Vibrations of an Euler-Bernoulli beam with hysteretic damping arising from dispersed frictional microcracks

We study free and harmonically forced vibrations of an Euler-Bernoulli beam with rate-independent hysteretic dissipation. The dissipation follows a model proposed elsewhere for materials with randomly dispersed frictional microcracks. The virtual work of distributed dissipative moments is approximated using Gaussian quadrature, yielding a few discrete internal hysteretic states. Lagrange's equations are obtained for the modal coordinates. Differential equations for the modal coordinates and internal states are integrated together. Free vibrations decay exponentially when a single mode dominates. With multiple modes active, higher modes initially decay rapidly while lower modes decay relatively slowly. Subsequently, lower modes show their own characteristic modal damping, while small amplitude higher modes show more erratic decay. Large dissipation, for the adopted model, leads mathematically to fast and damped oscillations in the limit, unlike viscously overdamped systems. Next, harmonically forced, lightly damped responses of the beam are studied using both a slow frequency sweep and a shooting-method based search for periodic solutions along with numerical continuation. Shooting method and frequency sweep results match for large ranges of frequency. The shooting method struggles near resonances, where internal states collapse into lower dimensional behavior and Newton-Raphson iterations fail. Near the primary resonances, simple numerically-aided harmonic balance gives excellent results. Insights are also obtained into the harmonic content of secondary resonances.