Copyright © 2012 L. Cveticanin and T. Pogány. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Free and self-excited vibrations of conservative oscillators with polynomial nonlinearity are considered. Mathematical model of the system is a second-order differential equation with a nonlinearity of polynomial type, whose terms are of integer and/or noninteger order. For the case when only one nonlinear term exists, the exact analytical solution of the differential equation is determined as a cosine-Ateb function. Based on this solution, the asymptotic averaging procedure for solving the perturbed strong non-linear differential equation is developed. The method does not require the existence of the small parameter in the system. Special attention is given to the case when the dominant term is a linear one and to the case when it is of any non-linear order. Exact solutions of the averaged differential equations of motion are obtained. The obtained results are compared with “exact” numerical solutions and previously obtained analytical approximate ones. Advantages and disadvantages of the suggested procedure are discussed.