Abstract
Results are presented from an experimental study of the dynamics of a lightly-damped, flexible beam which is buckled and unbuckled magnetically. The system is parametrically excited by driving an electromagnet with a low-frequency sine wave. For voltage amplitudes in excess of the static bifurcation value, the beam will slowly switch between the one and two-well configurations. Experimental static and dynamic bifurcation results are presented. Poincaré sections of a chaotic steady-state are obtained for various values of the driving phase, and the correlation dimension of the chaotic attractor is estimated. Singular system analysis is used to demonstrate the effect of delay time on the noise level in delay-reconstructions, and to provide an independent check on the dimension estimate by directly estimating the number of independent coordinates from time series data.
