Extensive development of micro/nano-electromechanical systems (MEMS/NEMS) has resulted in technologies that exhibit excellent performance over a wide range of applications in both applied (e.g. sensing, imaging, timing and signal processing) and fundamental sciences (e.g. quantum-level problems). Many of these outstanding applications benefit from resonance phenomena by employing micro/nanoscale mechanical resonators often fabricated into a beam-, membrane- or plate-type structure. During the early development stage, one of the vibrational modes (typically the fundamental mode) of a resonator is considered in the design and application. In the past decade, however, there has been a growing interest in using more than one vibrational mode for the enhanced functionality of MEMS/NEMS. In this paper, we review recent research efforts to investigate the nonlinear coupling and energy transfers between multiple modes in micro/nano-mechanical resonators, focusing especially on intermodal coupling, internal resonance and synchronization.This article is part of the theme issue 'Nonlinear energy transfer in dynamical and acoustical systems'.

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Exploiting nonlinear characteristics in micro/nanosystems has been a subject of increasing interest in the last decade. Among others, vigorous intermodal coupling through internal resonance (IR) has drawn much attention because it can suggest new strategies to steer energy within a micro/nanomechanical resonator. However, a challenge in utilizing IR in practical applications is imposing the required frequency commensurability between vibrational modes of a nonlinear micro/nanoresonator. Here, we experimentally and analytically investigate the 1:2 and 2:1 IR in a clamped–clamped beam resonator to provide insights into the detailed mechanism of IR. It is demonstrated that the intermodal coupling between the second and third flexural modes in an asymmetric structure (e.g., nonprismatic beam) provides an optimal condition to easily implement a strong IR with high energy transfer to the internally resonated mode. In this case, the quadratic coupling between these flexural modes, originating from the stretching effect, is the dominant nonlinear mechanism over other types of geometric nonlinearity. The design strategies proposed in this paper can be integrated into a typical micro/nanoelectromechanical system (M/NEMS) via a simple modification of the geometric parameters of resonators, and thus, we expect this study to stimulate further research and boost paradigm-shifting applications exploring the various benefits of IR in micro/nanosystems.

Early prediction of damages using vibration signal is essential in avoiding the failure in structures. Among different damage-detection approaches, the finite-element model updating and modal analysis-based methods are of most importance due to their applicability and feasibility. Owing to some restrictions in nodal measurements in experimental cases, finite-element model reduction is an indispensable part of fault-detection methods. Even though model reduction of dynamic systems leads to the less complicated models, an improved convergence rate and acceptable accuracy are highly required for a successful structural health monitoring of the real complex systems. In this paper, the aim is to design a damage-detection algorithm based on a new model updating method, which has a faster rate of convergence and higher accuracy. Then the proposed method is applied on a simulated damaged beam considering different noise levels to see how capable the method is in dealing with noise-corrupted data. Finally, the experimentally extracted data from a cracked beam in a real noisy condition are used to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed method in identifying the damages in a beam-like structure. It is concluded that the identification of the damages by the proposed method is encouraging and robust to the noise compared with the traditional method. Also, the proposed method converges faster and is more accurate in identifying damage than the traditional method.

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