UC Irvine

Using a Lagrangian framework, we study overdamping phenomena in gyroscopic systems composed of two components, one of which is highly lossy and the other is lossless. The losses are accounted by a Rayleigh dissipation function. As we have shown previously, for such a composite system, the modes split into two distinct classes, high-loss and low-loss, according to their dissipative behavior. A principal result of this paper is that for any such system, a rather universal phenomenon of selective overdamping occurs. Namely, first of all, the high-loss modes are all overdamped, i.e., non-oscillatory, as are an equal number of low-loss modes. Second of all, the rest of the low-loss modes remain oscillatory (i.e., the underdamped modes), each with an extremely high quality factor (Q-factor) that actually increases as the loss of the lossy component increases. We prove that selective overdamping is a generic phenomenon in Lagrangian systems with gyroscopic forces and gives an analysis of the overdamping phenomena in such systems. Moreover, using perturbation theory, we derive explicit formulas for upper bound estimates on the amount of loss required in the lossy component of the composite system for the selective overdamping to occur in the generic case and give Q-factor estimates for the underdamped modes. Central to the analysis is the introduction of the notion of a “dual” Lagrangian system and this yields significant improvements on some results on modal dichotomy and overdamping. The effectiveness of the theory developed here is demonstrated by applying it to an electric circuit with a gyrator element and a high-loss resistor.