Alternating chaos versus synchronized vibrations of interacting plate with beams

•Mathematical models of contact/no-contact interacting beams with a plate are given.•Novel chaotic and synchronized contact/no-contact phenomena are detected.•Influence of boundary conditions, clearance and symmetry of beams locations is studied.•Alternating beams vibration are detected and discussed.•Benefits of application of 2D Morlet wavelets versus FFT are shown.

We study networks of coupled oscillators governed by ODEs and yielded by physically validated sets of a few PDEs governing dynamics of structural members (plate and beams), chaos and phase synchronization and contact/no-contact non-linear dynamics of structural members coupled via boundary conditions. We have detected, illustrated and discussed a few novel kinds of hybrid states of the studied plate-beam(s) contact/no-contact interactions as well as novel scenarios of transition into chaos exhibited by the interplay of continuous objects. Classical (time histories, phase portraits, Poincaré maps, FFT, Lyapunov exponents) and non-classical (2D Morlet wavelets) approaches are used while monitoring non-linear dynamics of the interacting spatial structural members. Our results include examples from structural mechanics and the studied objects are modelled by validated mechanical hypotheses and assumptions. Novel non-linear phenomena including switching to different vibration regimes and phase chaotic synchronization are illustrated and discussed.