This volume introduces new approaches to modeling strongly nonlinear behaviour of structural mechanical units: beams, plates and shells or composite systems. The text draws on bifurcation theory and chaos, emphasizing control and stability of objects and systems.

This book provides students and researchers with a systematic solution for fluid-induced structural vibrations, galloping instability and the chaos of cables. They will also gain a better understanding of stable and unstable periodic motions and chaos in fluid-induced structural vibrations. Further, the results presented here will help engineers effectively design and analyze fluid-induced vibrations.

This book is written for all engineers, graduate students and beginners working in the application fields, and for experimental scientists in general. It is not presented as a purely theoretical treatise but shows mathematics at a workshop, so to speak, through important applications originating in a deep pure mathematical theory. Widely spread subjects which the author has encountered hitherto are briefly addressed in the book, as chaos and fractal science is a frontier of new research fields nowadays.

This textbook is aimed at newcomers to nonlinear dynamics and chaos, especially students taking a first course in the subject. The presentation stresses analytical methods, concrete examples, and geometric intuition. The theory is developed systematically, starting with first-order differential equations and their bifurcations, followed by phase plane analysis, limit cycles and their bifurcations, and culminating with the Lorenz equations, chaos, iterated maps, period doubling, renormalization, fractals, and strange attractors.

Discoveries of chaotic, unpredictable behaviour in physical deterministic systems has brought about new analytic and experimental techniques in dynamics. The modern study of the new phenomena requires the analyst to become familiar with experiments (at least with numerical ones), since chaotic solutions cannot be written down, and it requires the experimenter to master the new concepts of the theory of nonlinear dynamical systems. This book is unique in that it presents both viewpoints: the viewpoint of the analyst and of the experimenter. In the first part F. Moon outlines the new experimental techniques which have emerged from the study of chaotic vibrations. These include Poincaré sections, fractial dimensions and Lapunov exponents. In the text by W. Szemplinska-Stupnicka the relation between the new chaotic phenomena and classical perturbation techniques is explored for the first time. In the third part G. Iooss presents methods of analysis for the calculations of bifurcations in nonlinear systems based on modern geometric mathematical concepts.