Stochastic and chaotic sub- and superharmonic response of shallow cables due to chord elongations

The paper deals with the non-linear response of shallow cables driven by stochastically varying chord elongations caused by random vibrations of the supported structure. The chord elongation introduces parametric excitation in the linear stiffness terms of the modal coordinate equations, which are responsible for significant internal subharmonic and superharmonic resonances. Under harmonically varying support motions coupled ordered or chaotic in-plane and out-of-plane subharmonic and superharmonic periodic motions may take place. If the harmonically varying chord elongation is replaced by a zero-mean, stationary narrow-band random excitation with the same standard deviation and center frequency, qualitatively and quantitatively completely different modes of vibration are registered no matter how small the bandwidth of the excitation process is. Additionally, the stochastic excitation process tends to enhance chaotic behavior. Based on Monte Carlo simulation on a reduced non-linear two-degree-of freedom system the indicated effects have been investigated for stochastic subharmonic resonance of order 2:1, and stochastic superharmonic resonances of orders 1:2 and 2:3. By analyzing the responses for two chord elongation processes with almost identical auto-spectral density function, but completely different amplitudes, it is shown that the indicated qualitative and quantitative changes of the subharmonic resonance primarily are caused by the slowly varying phase of the stochastic excitation. The superharmonic stochastic responses are dominated by random jumps between a single mode in-plane and a coupled mode attractor, which are caused by the variation of the amplitude of the random excitation. Such jumps do not occur in the subharmonic response, because the single mode in-plane attractor is unstable.