To study the nonlinear dynamic behavior of the bladed overhang rotor system with squeeze film damper (SFD), a blade-overhang rotor-SFD model is formulated using the lumped mass method and the Lagrange approach. The cavitated short bearing model is employed to describe the nonlinear oil force of the SFD. To reduce the scale of the nonlinear coupling system, a set of orthogonal transformations is employed to decouple the one nodal diameter equations of blades, which are coupled with the dy- namical equations of the rotor, with other equations of blades. In this way, the original system with 16+4n (n≥3) degrees of freedom (DoF) is reduced to a system with 24 DoF only. Then the parametric excitation terms in the blade-overhang rotor-SFD model are simplified in terms of periodic transforma- tions. The coupling equations are numerically solved and the solutions are used to analyze the dy- namic behavior of the system in terms of the bifurcation diagram, whirl orbit, Poincaré map and spec- trum plot. A variety of motion types are found such as multi-periodic, quasi-periodic, and chaotic mo- tions. Moreover, the typical nonlinear dynamic evolutions including the periodic-doubling bifurcation and reverse bifurcation are noted. It is noticed that there exist apparent differences in the dynamic behavior between the blade-overhang rotor-SFD models without and with considering the effect of blades. To study the nonlinear dynamic behavior of the bladed overhang rotor system with squeeze film damper (SFD), a blade-overhang rotor-SFD model is formulated using the lumped mass method and the Lagrange approach. The cavitated short bearing model is employed to describe the To reduce the scale of the nonlinear coupling system, a set of orthogonal transformations is employed to decouple the one nodal diameter equations of blades, which are coupled with the dy-namical equations of the rotor, with other equations The first system with 16 + 4n (n ≧ 3) degrees of freedom (DoF) is reduced to a system with 24 DoF only. Then the parametric excitation terms in the blade-overhang rotor-SFD model are The coupling equations are numerically solved and the solutions are used to analyze the dy-namic behavior of the system in terms of the bifurcation diagram, whirl orbit, Poincaré map and spec- A variety of motion types are found such as multi-periodic, quasi-periodic, and chaotic mo- tions. Moreover, the typical nonlinear dynamic evolutions including the periodic-doubling bifurcation and reverse bifurcation are noted. It is noticed that there exist apparent differences in the dynamic behavior between the blade-overhang rotor-SFD models without and with considering the effect of blades.