The axisymmetric deformations of thick circular rings are investigated. Four materials are explored: linear material, incompressible Neo-Hookean material and Ogden's and Bower's forms of compressible Neo-Hookean material. Radial distributed forces and a displacement-dependent pressure are the external loads. This problem is relatively simple and allows analytical, or semi-analytical, solution; therefore it has been chosen as a benchmark to test commercial finite element software for various material laws at large strains. The solutions obtained with commercial finite element software are almost identical to the present semi-analytical ones, except for the linear material, for which commercial finite element programs give incorrect results.@en

A non-linear identification technique based on the harmonic balance method is presented to obtain the damping ratio and non-linear parameters of isotropic and laminated sandwich rectangular plates and curved panels, subjected to harmonic excitation orthogonal to the surface. The response of structures under consideration is approximated by a single-degree of freedom Duffing oscillator accounting for viscous damping, quadratic and cubic non-linear stiffness. The method uses experimental frequency-amplitude data and a least-squares technique to identify parameters and reconstruct frequency-response curves by spanning the excitation frequency in the neighborhood of the lowest natural frequencies. In particular, an iterative procedure is implemented to construct the mean displacement and identify the damping ratio. Close agreement is seen between the reconstructed non-linear frequency-amplitude curves, the experimental data and the results of the reduced-order model obtained in part 1 of the present study (Alijani et al., 2015 [1]). The proposed identification technique confirms the very large increase of damping during large-amplitude vibrations, as observed in part 1 of the present study, and demonstrates a non-linear correlation between damping, vibration amplitude and excitation level.@en

Theoretical and experimental non-linear vibrations of thin rectangular plates and curved panels subjected to out-of-plane harmonic excitation are investigated. Experiments have been performed on isotropic and laminated sandwich plates and panels with supported and free boundary conditions. A sophisticated measuring technique has been developed to characterize the non-linear behavior experimentally by using a Laser Doppler Vibrometer and a stepped-sine testing procedure. The theoretical approach is based on Donnell's non-linear shell theory (since the tested plates are very thin) but retaining in-plane inertia, taking into account the effect of geometric imperfections. A unified energy approach has been utilized to obtain the discretized non-linear equations of motion by using the linear natural modes of vibration. Moreover, a pseudo arc-length continuation and collocation scheme has been used to obtain the periodic solutions and perform bifurcation analysis. Comparisons between numerical simulations and the experiments show good qualitative and quantitative agreement. It is found that, in order to simulate large-amplitude vibrations, a damping value much larger than the linear modal damping should be considered. This indicates a very large and non-linear increase of damping with the increase of the excitation and vibration amplitude for plates and curved panels with different shape, boundary conditions and materials.@en

Owing to their atomic-scale thickness, the resonances of two-dimensional (2D) material membranes show signatures of nonlinearities at forces of only a few picoNewtons. Although the linear dynamics of membranes is well understood, the exact relation between the nonlinear response and the resonator's material properties has remained elusive. Here we show a method for determining the Young's modulus of suspended 2D material membranes from their nonlinear dynamic response. To demonstrate the method, we perform measurements on graphene and MoS2 nanodrums electrostatically driven into the nonlinear regime at multiple driving forces. We show that a set of frequency response curves can be fitted using only the cubic spring constant as a fit parameter, which we then relate to the Young's modulus of the material using membrane theory. The presented method is fast, contactless, and provides a platform for high-frequency characterization of the mechanical properties of 2D materials.@en