An Introduction to this Special Issue on Nonlinear Vibrations of Suspended Cables

Cables, strings, and ropes are very well established construction elements in all areas of engineering; in civil, in mechanical, in electrical engineering and even in applications in space engineering, for example tethered satellites. They take up heavy loads in suspension bridges or in large structures like airport buildings, they drive artificial arms and fingers, or they are themselves processed in textile- and printing-machines, they are used as underwater-cables in communication engineering and they transport electricity over large distances. In all applications it is essential during the design process to know not only the statics of such systems, but also the dynamical behavior, and this due to the fact that many of these practical examples include highly dynamical features, from nonlinear dynamical processes as in textile machines to unwanted vibrations in nearly all structures and mechanisms. Very often the well-known and frequently applied linear theories are not sufficient to describe all...