Modeling of Human-Induced Dynamic Bouncing Force Using a Self-Sustained Nonlinear Oscillator

This paper proposed a single-degree-of-freedom self-sustained nonlinear oscillator capable of precisely predicting the bouncing force induced by a person during bouncing activity on a flat and rigid surface. A bouncing person produces essential internal energy required to maintain its motion, so it can be modeled as a self-sustained oscillator that can generate (i) the stable limit cycle, (ii) the periodic bouncing force signal, and (iii) the self-sustained motion. A hybrid Van der Pol-Rayleigh oscillator added with two quadratic and one cubic nonlinear terms has been derived to yield desired softening and hardening effects as well as even and odd harmonics, as observed from the analysis of experimental bouncing force data. The force applied on the surface corresponds to its restoring force. The stability analysis of the oscillator has been performed using the energy balance and perturbation methods. The model parameters are extracted from the experimental bouncing force data resulting from a bouncing test on a group of seven subjects with shoe insoles at six different frequencies guided by a metronome. The bootstrapping method has been performed to examine the convergence of mean values of each model parameter by increasing the cardinality of the experimental set. The bouncing force signals produced by the proposed model and experimental results demonstrate an excellent agreement.