In this paper we present a mixed shooting – harmonic balance method for large linear mechanical systems on which local nonlinearities are imposed. The standard harmonic balance method (HBM), which approximates the periodic solution in frequency domain, is very popular as it is well suited for large systems with many degrees of freedom. However, it suffers from the fact that local nonlinearities cannot be evaluated directly in the frequency domain. The standard HBM performs an inverse Fourier transform, then calculates the nonlinear force in time domain and subsequently the Fourier coefficients of the nonlinear force. The disadvantage of the HBM is that strong nonlinearities are poorly represented by a truncated Fourier series. In contrast, the shooting method operates in time-domain and relies on numerical time-simulation. Set-valued force laws such as dry friction or other strong nonlinearities can be dealt with if an appropriate numerical integrator is available. The shooting method, however, becomes infeasible if the system has many states. The proposed mixed shooting-HBM approach combines the best of both worlds.

The goal of paper is the development and demonstration of efficiency of algorithm for form finding of a slack cable notwithstanding of the initial position chosen. This algorithm is based on product of two sets of coefficients, which restrict the rate of looking for cable geometry changes at each iteration. The first set restricts the maximum allowable change of absolute values of positions, angles and axial forces. The second set takes into account whether the process is the converging one (the signs of maximal change of parameters remain the same), so that it increases the allowable changes; or it is a diverging one, so that these changes are discarded. The proposed procedure is applied to two different methods of simple slack cable calculation under a number of concentrated forces. The first one is a typical finite element method, with the cable considered as consisting of number of straight elements, with unknown positions of their ends, and it is essentially an absolute coordinate method. The second method is a typical Irvine’s like analytical solution, which presents only two unknowns at the initial point of the cable; due to the peculiarity of implementation it is named here a shooting method. Convergence process is investigated for both solutions for arbitrary chosen, even very illogical initial positions for the ACM, and for angle and force at the left end for SM as well. Even if both methods provide the same correct convergent results, it is found that the ACM requires a much lower number of iterations.