The steam generator is a heat exchanger and participates to the nuclear safety. Energy is transferred from the primary to the secondary fluid through many U-tubes maintained vertically by support plates. A sludge deposit tends to modify the boundary conditions and the secondary fluid flow. A fluid-elastic instability can then occur and lead to quick tube ruin. This thesis seeks a better understanding of the effect of contact nonlinearity on the dynamics of a tube in-air intermittently impacting the support plates and its consequences in regards with instability. The use of discretized contact conditions with circular obstacles distributed over the thickness of the plates and the use of enriched reduction bases allow quick and relevant nonlinear numerical simulations. These simulations are well correlated with experimental measurements and valid even with strong nonlinearity or negative modal damping. The evolution of power spectral densities (PSD) with growing excitation amplitude is analyzed: padding of the anti-resonances, peak shift and spread. It is then shown that an apparent stiffness associated with a permanent bilateral contact is pertinent to describe these transitions. In the case of an unstable linear system, one demonstrates that the nonlinearity keeps the responses bounded or stabilised, thus paving the way for future work with real or simulated fluid flows.
