The Role of Global Dynamics in Analysis, Control and Safe Design

Global nonlinear dynamics has been evolving in a revolutionary way in about the last two decades, with development of sophisticated techniques employing concepts/tools of dynamical systems, bifurcation, and chaos theory, and applications to a wide variety of mechanical/structural systems. Relevant achievements entail a substantial change of perspective in dealing with vibration problems, and are ready to affect significantly the analysis, control, and safe design of systems at different scales. Upon framing the topic within the hystorical development of nonlinear dynamics in solid/structural mechanics, the seminar focuses on highlighting the role played by global analysis in unveiling the nonlinear response and actual safety of engineering systems in diverse environments. Reduced order models of macro/micro-structures are considered to illustrate a few objectives.

Key Learning Objectives

• Unveiling effects of fast/mechanical-slow/thermal coupling on long-term dynamics
• Assessing robustness and overall stability of mechanical/structural systems via dynamical integrity
• Leveraging global concepts/phenomena for control purposes
• Predicting global safety mismatches due to practical conditions or - locally-tailored control
• Dealing with non-deterministic systems: attractors distributions and basins of attraction
• Enhancing load carrying capacity via a global dynamics-informed paradigm both safe and reliable
• Exploiting refined nonlinear model reduction to face global dynamics of high-dimensional systems

Who Should Attend

• Researchers/scientists in applied mechanics and nonlinear dynamics of structures and systems
• Mechanical and structural engineers