The elastic pendulum: A nonlinear paradigm

A pendulum with an elastic instead of an inextensible suspension is the simplest realization of an autonomous, conservative, oscillatory system of several degrees of freedom with nonlinear coupling; it can also have an internal 1:2 resonance. A fairly complete study of this system at and near resonance is here undertaken by means of the ’’slow‐fluctuation’’ approximation which consists in developing the x2y‐type interaction into a trigonometric polynomial and keeping only the term with the slowest frequency. Extensive computations showed that up to moderately large amplitudes the approximate solutions were virtually as accurate as numerical integrations of the exact equations of motion. The slow‐fluctuation equations of motion can be completely integrated by quadratures. Explicit solutions for amplitudes and phases are given in terms of elliptic functions, and can be linked to initial conditions. There exist two branches of purely periodic, harmonic, constant‐amplitude motions which are orbitally stable b...

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