Explicit Backbone Curves from Spectral Submanifolds of Forced-Damped Nonlinear Mechanical Systems

Spectral submanifolds (SSMs) have recently been shown to provide exact and unique reduced-order models for nonlinear unforced mechanical vibrations. Here we extend these results to periodically or quasiperiodically forced mechanical systems, obtaining analytic expressions for forced responses and backbone curves on modal (i.e. two-dimensional) time dependent SSMs. A judicious choice of the parameterization of these SSMs allows us to simplify the reduced dynamics considerably. We demonstrate our analytical formulae on three numerical examples and compare them to results obtained from available normal form methods.