Nonlinear oscillation of elastic sagged cable using refined mode truncation: A comparative study

A nonlinear sagged cable, due to its initial curvature, leads to various challenges of empirical mode truncation used by routine Galerkin method when constructing reduced-order model. It is recently elucidated that (Guo and Rega, 2023a), the key for refined mode truncation (and thus for correct nonlinear dynamics prediction) is to first eliminate low-order nonlinear terms of spatial continuous structures. This paper focuses on refined truncation of nonlinear sagged cable by leveraging the recent low-order elimination perspective, which is realized by a normal form development. Further comparative studies for both primary resonant and two-to-one internally resonant dynamics of the sagged cable, including nonlinear frequency responses, backbone curves, and Poincaré mapping, demonstrate notable differences between the two different types of models built by either routine or refined truncation, which confirms necessity of the refined mode truncation used for geometrically nonlinear structures like sagged cables.