Qualitative Analysis of Nonsmooth Dynamics: A Simple Discrete System with Unilateral Contact and Coulomb Friction

Qualitative Analysis of Nonsmooth Dynamics: A Simple Discrete System with Unilateral Contact and Coulomb Friction explores the effects of small and large deformations to understand how shocks, sliding, and stick phases affect the trajectories of mechanical systems. By analyzing these non-regularities successively this work explores the set of equilibria and properties of periodic solutions of elementary mechanical systems, where no classical results issued from the theory of ordinary differential equations are readily available, such as stability, continuation or approximation of solutions. The authors focus on unilateral contact in presence of Coulomb friction and show, in particular, how any regularization would greatly simplify the mathematics but lead to unacceptable physical responses.