The harmonic balance method for advanced analysis and design of nonlinear mechanical systems

As a tool for analyzing nonlinear large-scale structures, the harmonic balance (HB) method has recently received increasing attention in the structural dynamics community. However, its use was so far limited to the approximation and study of periodic solutions, and other methods as the shooting and orthogonal collocation techniques were usually preferred to further analyze these solutions and to study their bifurcations. This is why the present paper intends to demonstrate how one can take advantage of the HB method as an efficient alternative to the cited techniques. Two different applications are studied, namely the normal modes of a spacecraft and the optimization of the design of a vibration absorber. The interesting filtering feature of the HB method and the implementation of an efficient bifurcation tracking extension are illustrated.