An accurate closed-form approximate solution for the quintic Duffing oscillator equation

Abstract

An accurate closed-form solution for the quintic Duffing equation is obtained using a cubication method. In this method the restoring force is expanded in Chebyshev polynomials and the original nonlinear differential equation is approximated by a cubic Duffing equation in which the coefficients for the linear and cubic terms depend on the initial amplitude. The replacement of the original nonlinear equation by an approximate cubic 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 cn, respectively. 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 lower than 0.37%.