Collocation-based harmonic balance framework for highly accurate periodic solution of nonlinear dynamical system

Periodic dynamical systems ubiquitously exist in science and engineering. The harmonic balance (HB) method and its variants have been the most widely-used approaches for such systems, but are either confined to low-order approximations or impaired by aliasing and improper-sampling problems. Here we propose a collocation-based harmonic balance framework to successfully unify and reconstruct the HB-like methods. Under this framework a new conditional identity, which exactly bridges the gap between frequency-domain and time-domain harmonic analyses, is discovered by introducing a novel aliasing matrix. Upon enforcing the aliasing matrix to vanish, we propose a powerful reconstruction harmonic balance (RHB) method that obtains extremely high-order (>100) nonaliasing solutions, previously deemed out-of-reach, for a range of complex nonlinear systems including the cavitation bubble dynamics, the three-body problem and the two dimensional airfoil dynamics. We show that the present method is 2–3 orders of magnitude more accurate and simultaneously much faster than the state-of-the-art method. Hence, it has immediate applications in multidisciplinary problems where highly accurate periodic solutions are sought.