An explicit approximate solution to the Duffing-harmonic oscillator by a cubication method

Abstract

The nonlinear oscillations of a Duffing-harmonic oscillator are investigated by an approximated method based on the ‘cubication’ of the initial nonlinear differential equation. In this cubication method the restoring force is expanded in Chebyshev polynomials and the original nonlinear differential equation is approximated by a Duffing equation in which the coefficients for the linear and cubic terms depend on the initial amplitude, A. The replacement of the original nonlinear equation by an approximate Duffing equation allows us to obtain explicit approximate formulas for the frequency and the solution as a function of the complete elliptic integral of the first kind and the Jacobi elliptic function, respectively. These explicit formulas are valid for all values of the initial amplitude and we conclude this cubication method works very well for the whole range of initial amplitudes. Excellent agreement of the approximate frequencies and periodic solutions with the exact ones is demonstrated and discussed and the relative error for the approximate frequency is as low as 0.071%. Unlike other approximate methods applied to this oscillator, which are not capable to reproduce exactly the behaviour of the approximate frequency when A tends to zero, the cubication method used in this paper predicts exactly the behaviour of the approximate frequency not only when A tends to infinity, but also when A tends to zero. Finally, a closed-form expression for the approximate frequency is obtained in terms of elementary functions. To do this, the relationship between the complete elliptic integral of the first kind and the arithmetic-geometric mean as well as Legendre’s formula to approximately obtain this mean are used.