Steelpans are musical percussions made from steel barrels. During the manufacturing, the metal is stretched and bended, to produce a set of thin shells that are the differents notes of the instrument. In normal playing, each note is struck, and the sound reveals some nonlinear characteristics which give its peculiar tone to the instrument. In this paper, an experimental approach is first presented in order to show the complex dynamics existing in steelpan’s vibrations. Then two models, based on typical modal interactions, are proposed to quantify these nonlinearities. Finally, one of them is observed in free oscillations simulations, in order to compare the internal resonance model to the steelpan vibrations behaviour in normal playing. The aim is to identify the important modes participating in the vibrations in view of building reduced-order models for modal sound synthesis.