Interpreting Proper Orthogonal Modes in Vibrations

We investigate the interpretation of proper orthogonal modes (POMs) of displacements in both linear and nonlinear vibrations. The POMs in undamped linear symmetric systems can represent linear natural modes if the mass distribution is known. This is appoximately true in a distributed system if it is discretized uniformly. If a single mode dominates, the dominant POM approximates the dominant mode. This is also true if a distributed system is discretized arbitrarily. Generally, the POMs represent the principal axes of inertia of the data in the coordinate space. For synchronous nonlinear normal modes, the dominant POM represents a best fit of the nonlinear modal curve. Linear and nonlinear simulation examples are presented.