Chaotic Dynamics of a Harmonically Excited Spring-Pendulum System with Internal Resonance

An investigation into chaotic responses of a weakly nonlinear multi-degree-of-freedom system is made. The specific system examined is a harmonically excited spring pendulum system, which is known to be a good model for a variety of engineering systems, including ship motions with nonlinear coupling between pitching and rolling motions. By the method of multiple scales the original nonautonomous system is reduced to an approximate autonomous system of amplitude and phase variables. The approximate system is shown to have Hopf bifurcation and a sequence of period-doubling bifurcations leading to chaotic motions. In order to examine what happens in the original system when the approximate system exhibits chaos, we compare the largest Lyapunov exponents for both systems.