Overview

Welcome.

These pages describe some recent projects conducted in the nonlinear mechanics lab at Duke. They have some common threads. Many includes experiments,  including the large deflection of elastic structural systems. A good deal of the applications of this research are associated with aerospace engineering. More recently 3D-printing has featured in this work.

In many ways linear models are atypical and often used due to analytic expediency. These webpages provide outline descriptions of research projects focused on nonlinear behavior, in which analytic, numerical and experimental approaches are developed.


Click on each of the research tabs to find a brief description of the work involved.


Meetings, conferences and seminars are an important aspect of research. Some images are included below:

IUTAM Symposium, Stuttgart, 1989

IUTAM Symposium, London, 1993

IUTAM Symposium, Cornell, 1997

Mode Jumping workshop, Duke, 2002

Differential Equations Conference, Duke, 2002

Vibrations of Continuous Systems, Lake District, 2007

Michael Thompson retirement, London, 2004

Nonlinear Vibrations Workshop, Duke, 2008

Nonlinear Vibrations Workshop, Duke, 2010

Mechanics of Slender Structures (MoSS), Baltimore, 2008

Mechanics of Slender Structures (MoSS), San Sabastian, 2010

Nonsmooth Systems, Bristol, 2004

ENL Annual Review, 2014

ENL Annual Review 2016

ENL Annual Review, 2017

NODYCON, Rome, 2019

Some group members at a wedding


A workshop on Exploiting Nonlinear Dynamics took place at CISM in Udine, Italy a few years ago. Here are the slides from four lectures:

Another tutorial was held as part of an ASME conference in Portland, OR, also a few years ago. This same (4 hour) tutorial was also presented at the ASME-IDETC conference in Charlotte NC in August 2016. This was based almost entirely on the book Vibrations of Axially-Loaded Structures. Here are the slides from that: