Abstract: The stability and bifurcations of a two-dimensional simply supported plate exposed to a supersonic flow are studied. Attention is paid to local behavior of the system near a degenerate equilibrium in which the system has a linear part with double zero eigenvalues. The center manifold and normal form theory are applied to reduce the equation of motion of the system to a simple low-dimensional one near the degenerate system. The main result obtained is that three kinds of codimension and two bifurcations are found on certain parameter plane in that system. Numerical simulations are performed by using the original four-dimensional equation to confirm the analytical results. Some global behavior of the system is also investigated numerically.

Key words: panel flutter, local bifurcation, global behavior