Nonlinear oscillator with power-form elastic-term: Fourier series expansion of the exact solution

Abstract

A family of conservative, truly nonlinear, oscillators with integer or non-integer order nonlinearity is considered. These oscillators have only one odd power-form elastic-term and exact expressions for their period and solution were found in terms of Gamma functions and a cosine-Ateb function, respectively. Only for a few values of the order of nonlinearity, is it possible to obtain the periodic solution in terms of more common functions. However, for this family of conservative truly nonlinear oscillators we show in this paper that it is possible to obtain the Fourier series expansion of the exact solution, even though this exact solution is unknown. The coefficients of the Fourier series expansion of the exact solution are obtained as an integral expression in which a regularized incomplete Beta function appears. These coefficients are a function of the order of nonlinearity only and are computed numerically. One application of this technique is to compare the amplitudes for the different harmonics of the solution obtained using approximate methods with the exact ones computed numerically as shown in this paper. As an example, the approximate amplitudes obtained via a modified Ritz method are compared with the exact ones computed numerically.