Stability of elastic and viscoelastic systems under a random perturbations of their parameters

Summary The present paper is concerned with the investigation of the almost sure stability of elastic and viscoelastic systems, when their parameters assume a random wide-band stationary process. The parameters are parametric loads, characteristics of external damping and material viscosity. With the help of Liapunov's direct method, the sufficient condition of the almost sure asymptotic stability for distributed parameter systems with respect to perturbations of initial conditions of an arbitrary form is obtained. It is shown that, in some cases, this condition coincides with a similar condition derived from the assumption that the form of sure and required perturbations coincides with the first eigenfunction of system oscillations. However, an example is given for the stability of a viscoelastic rod, when the perturbations of initial conditions are more dangerous, if their form differs from the first eigenfunction.This research was sponsored by the Russian Foundation of Fundamental Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences under Grant 94-01-01522.