Occurrence of stable periodic modes in a pendulum with cubic damping

Dynamical systems with nonlinear damping show interesting behavior in the periodic and chaotic phases. The Froude pendulum with cubical and linear damping is a paradigm for such a system. In this work the driven Froude pendulum is studied by the harmonic balancing method; the resulting nonlinear response curves are studied further for resonance and stability of symmetric oscillations with relatively low damping. The stability analysis is carried out by transforming the system of equations to the linear Mathieu equation.