STOCHASTIC PERTURBATION APPROACH TO ENGINEERING STRUCTURE VIBRATIONS BY THE FINITE DIFFERENCE METHOD

The main idea of the paper is to introduce the second order perturbation second probabilistic moment analysis in the context of the finite difference method (FDM) modelling of vibrations. The approach can be successfully applied in all those engineering analyses where FDM modelling of engineering structures vibrations is still useful and, at the same time, some structural parameters are random variables or fields. The general advantage of the stochastic finite difference method (SFDM) proposed is the relatively easy extension of the existing deterministic results of the classical elastodynamics on the random or stochastic case. However, similarly to stochastic boundary or finite element methods, the approach proposed has its limitations on the second order random uncertainties measures of input random variables.