An essay on the vibrating string and its nonlinearities
Martin Devaud, Thierry Hocquet · HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2017
As soon as its elasticity is sollicitated, the Melde vibrating string exhibits a strong nonlinear behaviour even though it is made of a perfectly elastic material. When sinusoidally excited by means of an electric vibrator, the string's motion may become bistable, yielding hysteresis cycles. We propose a simple model accounting for these cycles, and bringing in a unique adjustable parameter gathering the wealth of dissipative processes that limit the string's oscillation amplitude.