Experimental Characterization of Friction in a Negative Stiffness Nonlinear Oscillator

Nonlinear dissipative phenomena are common features of many dynamical systems and engineering applications, and their experimental characterization has always been a challenge among the research community. Within the wide range of nonlinear damping mechanisms, friction is surely one of the most common, and with a high impact on the dynamical behavior of structures. In this paper, the nonlinear identification of friction in a negative stiffness oscillator is pursued. The structure exhibits a strong nonlinear behavior, mainly due to its polynomial elastic restoring force with a negative stiffness region. This leads to an asymmetric double-well potential with two stable equilibrium positions, and the possibility of switching between them in a chaotic way. Friction plays a crucial role in this context, as it derives from the continuous sliding between the central guide and the moving mass. The system is driven through harmonic tests with several input amplitudes, in order to estimate the variations in the energy dissipated per cycle. The identification of the frictional behavior is then pursed by minimizing the errors between the experimental measurements and the model predictions, using the harmonic balance method in conjunction with a continuation technique on the forcing amplitudes.