Vibration response analysis of 2-DOF locally nonlinear systems based on the theory of modal superposition

Many important vibration phenomena which simultaneously contain quadratic nonlinear stiffness and damping exist in the complicated vibrating systems under practical circumstances. In this paper, we established a 2-degree-of-freedom (DOF) nonlinear vibration model for such a system, deduced the differential equations of motion which govern its dynamics, and worked out the solutions for the governing equations by the principle of superposition of nonlinear normal modes (NLNM) based on Shaw’s theory of invariant manifolds. We conducted numerical simulations with the established model, using superposition of nonlinear normal modes and direct numerical methods, respectively. The obtained results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method in that its calculated data varies in a similar tendency to that of the direct numerical solutions.