A unified approach to two types of evolutionary random response problems in engineering

Summary Response of structures to earthquake excitations and response of vehicles to road undulations are two typical evolutionary random problems in engineering. Both kinds of the evolutionary random excitations can be regarded as evolved from stationary random excitations, though through two utterly different ways. The former one may be obtained by filtering a stationary random process through a linear time-dependent system, while the latter one may result from nonlinear transformations of the argument of a stationary random process. However, the response problems due to both types of excitations have much in common. By introducing the concept of “evolutionary frequency response”, the expressions of the response evolutionary spectra for both problems can be obtained in a unified, concise way, similar to the input/output PSD relationship in a stationary random problem. For both the evolutionary random problems, the solution procedures are all the same, but the expressions for evolutionary frequency responses are different from each other. Moreover, the evolutionary frequency responses may be interpreted as transient responses of the system subject to certain deterministic evolutionary harmonic excitations. In this sense, an evolutionary random response problem can be reduced to a deterministic response problem. Based on the complex modal analysis, a unified approach to these two response problems is derived here. The method can be applied to any linear time-invariant systems, whether they are symmetrical or not, and whether they are classically damped or not. And the method might be hopefully applied to nonlinear systems, if the statistical linearization technique is accompanied. To the knowledge of the authors, this unified approach to two types of evolutionary random response problems is the first time reported in literature. Received 28 May 1996; accepted for publication 8 January 1997