Fractional damping effects on the transient dynamics of the Duffing oscillator

Abstract

We consider the nonlinear Duffing oscillator in presence of fractional damping which is characteristic in different physical situations. The system is studied with a smaller and larger damping parameter value, that we call the underdamped and overdamped regimes. In both we have studied the relation between the fractional parameter, the amplitude of the oscillations and the times to reach the asymptotic behavior, called asymptotic times. In the overdamped regime, the study shows that, also here, there are oscillations for fractional order derivatives and their amplitudes and asymptotic times can suddenly change for small variations of the fractional parameter. In addition, in this latter regime, a resonant-like behavior can take place for suitable values of the parameters of the system. These results are corroborated by calculating the corresponding -factor. We expect that these results can be useful for a better understanding of fractional dynamics and its possible applications as in modeling different kind of materials that normally need complicated damping terms.