Nonlinear dynamic Interactions between flow-induced galloping and shell-like buckling

For an elastic system that is non-conservative but autonomous, subjected for example to time-independent loading by a steadily flowing fluid (air or water), a dangerous bifurcation, such as a sub-critical bifurcation, or a cyclic fold, will trigger a dynamic jump to one or more remote stable attractors. When there is more than one candidate attractor, the one onto which the structure settles can then be indeterminate, being sensitive to infinitesimally small variations in starting conditions or parameters.

In this paper we develop and study an archetypal model to explore the nonlinear dynamic interactions between galloping at an incipient sub-critical Hopf bifurcation of a structure with shell-like buckling behaviour that is gravity-loaded to approach a sub-critical pitch-fork bifurcation. For the fluid forces, we draw on the aerodynamic coefficients determined experimentally by Novak for the flow around a bluff body of rectangular cross-section. Meanwhile, for the structural component, we consider a variant of the propped-cantilever model that is widely used to illustrate the sub-critical pitch-fork: within this model a symmetry-breaking imperfection makes the behaviour generic.

The compound bifurcation corresponding to simultaneous galloping and buckling is the so-called Takens-Bodganov Cusp. We make a full unfolding of this codimension-3 bifurcation for our archetypal model to explore the adjacent phase-space topologies and their indeterminacies.