Fractional damping through restricted calculus of variations

Abstract

We deliver a novel approach towards the variational description of Lagrangian mechanical systems subject to fractional damping by establishing a restricted Hamilton's principle. Fractional damping is a particular instance of non-local (in time) damping, which is ubiquitous in mechanical engineering applications. The restricted Hamilton's principle relies on including fractional derivatives to the state space, the doubling of curves (which implies an extra mirror system) and the restriction of the class of varied curves. We will obtain the correct dynamics, and will show rigorously that the extra mirror dynamics is nothing but the main one in reversed time; thus, the restricted Hamilton's principle is not adding extra physics to the original system. The price to pay, on the other hand, is that the fractional damped dynamics is only a sufficient condition for the extremals of the action. In addition, we proceed to discretise the new principle. This discretisation provides a set of numerical integrators for the continuous dynamics that we denote Fractional Variational Integrators (FVIs). The discrete dynamics is obtained upon the same ingredients, say doubling of discrete curves and restriction of the discrete variations. We display the performance of the FVIs, which have local truncation order 1, in two examples. As other integrators with variational origin, for instance those generated by the discrete Lagrange-d'Alembert principle, they show a superior performance tracking the dissipative energy, in opposition to direct (order 1) discretisations of the dissipative equations, such as explicit and implicit Euler schemes.