Grazing bifurcations in an elastic structure excited by harmonic impactor motions

In this article, non-smooth dynamics of an elastic structure excited by a harmonic impactor motion is studied through a combination of experimental, numerical, and analytical efforts. The test apparatus consists of a stainless steel cantilever structure with a tip mass that is impacted by a shaker. Soft impact between the impactor and the structure is considered, and bifurcations with respect to quasi-static variation of the shaker excitation frequency are examined. In the experiments, qualitative changes that can be associated with grazing and corner-collision bifurcations are observed. Aperiodic motions are also observed in the vicinity of the non-smooth bifurcation points. Assuming the system response to be dominated by the structure’s fundamental mode, a non-autonomous, single degree-of-freedom model is developed and used for local analysis and numerical simulations. The predicted grazing and corner-collision bifurcations are in agreement with the experimental results. To study the local bifurcation behavior at the corner-collision point and explore the mechanism responsible for the aperiodic motions, a derivation is carried out to construct local Poincaré maps of periodic orbits at a corner-collision point such as the one observed in the soft-impact oscillator.