Yonggang W., Shiliang D.

The present discussed bimetallic plates are widely used in precision instruments and micromachines. Much attention has received for the thermal stability problem of this kind of plates and shells. However, ther are few archival publications related to their chaotic motion and bifurcation behavior to the best of authors¡¯ knowledge. Recently, the authors obtained the compact control equations for the nonlinear vibration problem of heated thin bimetallic plates and further gained their periodic solutions, but still with no concern of their chaotic motion. Considering the effect of geometric nonlinearity and uniformly distributed stationary temperature, the bifurcation behaviors and chaotic phenomena of a bimetallic thin circular plate under transverse periodic excitation are investigated in this paper. First of all, the nonlinear dynamic equations for the bimetallic plate are established by employing the Galerkin¡¯s technique. Furthermore, the critical conditions for occurrence of homoclinic and subharmonic bifurcations as well as chaos are studied theoretically by means of Melnikov function method. Finally, the chaotic motions are searched and simulated numerically with the application of Computer Algebra Systems Maple, and the Poincar¨¦ map and phase curve along with time-history diagram are used to evaluate if a chaotic motion appears. The results indicate that there exist some chaotic motions in heated bimetallic plate.