Experimental irreversible passive energy transfer in coupled nonlinear oscillators

peer reviewedExperimental verification of passive nonlinear energy pumping in two configurations of coupled oscillators with essential nonlinearities is carried out. In the experiments presented the nonlinear attachment interacts with a single linear mode, and passive targeted energy transfer occurs at a single ‘fast’ frequency in the neighborhood of the eigen frequency of a linear mode. Good agreement between simulated and experimental results is observed, in spite of the strongly (essentially) nonlinear and transient nature of the dynamics of the systems considered. The experiments bear out earlier predictions that a significant fraction of the energy introduced directly to a linear structure by an external impulsive (broadband) load can be transferred (pumped) to an essentially nonlinear attachment, and dissipated there locally without spreading back to the system. In addition, the reported experimental results confirm that (a) nonlinear energy pumping in systems of coupled oscillators can occur only above a certain threshold of the input energy, and (b) there is an optimal value of the energy input at which a maximum portion of the energy is absorbed and dissipated at the NES