On the effect of nonsmooth Coulomb friction on Hopf bifurcations in a 1-DoF oscillator with self-excitation due to negative damping

This article deals with the question, to what extent damping due to nonsmooth Coulomb friction may affect the stability and bifurcation behavior of vibrational systems with self-excitation due to negative effective damping which-for the smooth case-is related to a Hopf bifurcation of the steady state. Without damping due to Coulomb friction, the stability of the trivial solution is controlled by the effective viscous damping of the system: as the damping becomes negative, the steady state loses stability at a Hopf point. Adding Coulomb friction changes the trivial solution into a set of equilibria, which-for oscillatory systems-is asymptotically stable for all values of effective viscous damping. The Hopf point vanishes and an unstable limit cycle appears which borders the basin of attraction of the equilibrium set. Moreover, the influence of nonlinear damping terms is discussed. The effect of Coulomb frictional damping may be seen as adding an imperfection to the classical smooth Hopf scenario: as the imperfection vanishes, the behavior of the smooth problem is recovered.