New results on Painlevé paradoxes (Q1976211)

In 1895, Painlevé proposed his principle: two rigid bodies, which under given conditions would not produce any pressure on one another, if they were ideally smooth, would likewise not act on one another if they were rough. This note aims at illustrating by a simple example the well-posedness of the dynamics of mechanical systems with unilateral constraints and with dry friction. The analyzed example is the well-known Painlevé system. A new critical friction coefficient is presented, the contact forces of which remain bounded. Moreover, a detailed analysis of the vector field near the singularity shows that the eventual divergence of contact forces does not call into the question about the well-posedness of the model. In modern language, Painlevé's problem can be recast into the framework of hybrid dynamical systems, i.e. systems which contain both continuous and discrete-event state variables. Such systems are therefore described by differential equations corresponding to the modes of the systems, and by switching rules at the transitions between different modes This paper is organized as follows. In section 2, the authors present the model and the regions of inconsistencies and indeterminaries. Section 3 is devoted to the study of the indeterminancy region, introducing analytical tools that will be useful in the sequel. Section 4 describes transitions from a consistent sliding mode when the contact force takes arbitrary lauge values in the neighbourhood of the singular point. Conclusions are given in section 5.