Vibrations of Thin Elastic Plates Subject to Random Driving Forces

Summary

A stationary Gaussian random load is simulated digitally and employed as the forcing function in the equations of motion of a damped, elastic square plate whose resistance to deformation is due to bending and stretching. The power-residue method for generating pseudo-random numbers is employed in a technique presented for constructing the random forcing function. The nonlinear equation of motion and the compatibility equation are solved in finite-difference form for the case of a forcing function representing a time-random concentrated load applied at the center of a plate. From the numerical solution, statistical measures of the response at the center of the plate are obtained. The analysis holds for finite amplitude oscillations of the plate.