Chaotic vibrations of circular cylindrical shells: Galerkin versus reduced-order models via the proper orthogonal decomposition method

The geometric nonlinear response of a water-filled, simply supported circular cylindrical shell to harmonic excitation in the spectral neighbourhood of the fundamental natural frequency is investigated. The response is investigated for a fixed excitation frequency by using the excitation amplitude as bifurcation parameter for a wide range of variation. Bifurcation diagrams of Poincaré maps obtained from direct time integration and calculation of the Lyapunov exponents and Lyapunov dimension have been used to study the system. By increasing the excitation amplitude, the response undergoes (i) a period-doubling bifurcation, (ii) subharmonic response, (iii) quasi-periodic response and (iv) chaotic behaviour with up to 16 positive Lyapunov exponents (hyperchaos). The model is based on Donnell's nonlinear shallow-shell theory, and the reference solution is obtained by the Galerkin method. The proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) method is used to extract proper orthogonal modes that describe the system behaviour from time-series response data. These time-series have been obtained via the conventional Galerkin approach (using normal modes as a projection basis) with an accurate model involving 16 degrees of freedom (dofs), validated in previous studies. The POD method, in conjunction with the Galerkin approach, permits to build a lower-dimensional model as compared to those obtainable via the conventional Galerkin approach. Periodic and quasi-periodic response around the fundamental resonance for fixed excitation amplitude, can be very successfully simulated with a 3-dof reduced-order model. However, in the case of large variation of the excitation, even a 5-dof reduced-order model is not fully accurate. Results show that the POD methodology is not as “robust” as the Galerkin method.