7.
Response to General Dynamic Loading
Response to an impulsive force
An impulsive force is a large force that acts
for a short duration of time. Although the
force may be infinite its time integral is
finite.
Referring to Figure 1, the magnitude of the
impulse, denoted by I, is obtained from
(1)
where is the very small interval of time
during which the impulse is acting.
Fig. 1: Impulse of an Impulsive force
Response to an impulsive force
Newton’s second law of motion states that the effect of an impulsive force is to cause a
change in the velocity of the mass on which it is acting. Denoting the change of velocity by
we get
(2)
If the mass was initially at rest, it will have a velocity after the action of the impulse.
Thus, if a SDOF system of mass m and restrained by a spring of stiffness k is subjected to an
impulsive force, it will undergo vibration with the initial conditions and . The resultant
response is
(3)
The response when is denoted by and is called a unit impulse function.
(4)
Response to an impulsive force
When damping is present, the unit impulse function becomes
(5)
Response to general dynamic loading
A general dynamic loading can be represented as a
series of impulses as shown in Figure 2. Thus for a
linear system where the principle of superposition
holds, the response of the system at time t can be
obtained by adding the effect of impulses prior to
that time. At time t the effect of the shaded impulse
is given by noting that the time elapsed after the
impulse was applied is
Fig. 3:General dynamic loading as a
(6) series of impulses
Response to general dynamic loading
On superposing the effect of all pulses before time t we get the total response at that time
(7)
The response of a damped system is given by
(8)
Integrals in Eq 7 and 8 can be expressed in the general form
(9)
Equation 9 is referred to as the convolution integral or Duhamel’s equation.
Response to general dynamic loading
It should be noted that in deriving Eq. 9 the system was assumed to be at rest at time .
Instead if it started with an initial displacement and initial velocity the free vibration solution
for these initial condition should be added to the solution obtained from Eq. 9. Thus for a
damped system the total solution becomes
(10)
Response to a ramp function load
As one example of the application of Duhamel’s integral, consider the response of an
undamped system to a ramp function load, which is a load that increases linearly with time.
(11)
Response to a ramp function load
The ramp function load is illustrated in Fig. 4a
Fig. 4: Response to a ramp function load: (a) ramp function load; (b) response
Response to a ramp function load
The Duhamel’s integral for an undamped system subjected to ramp function is
(12)
The solution is plotted in Fig. 4b. For . The effect of initial conditions has not been
included. The response is seen to oscillate about the average value of
Response to a step function load
The response to step function load shown is obtained
from the Duhamel’s integration
(13)
Figure 5: Step function load.
Response to a step function load
If the system is undamped . On substituting this value of and in Eq. 13 and adding the
effect of initial condition we get
(14)
As an alternative to using the Duhamel’s integral we directly solve the equation
(15)
The Complementary function is . Assume that the particular function is . On substitution in
Eq. 15 we get . The complete solution is
(16)
Constants A and B are obtained by using the initial conditions and . We get
and . Substituting these values in Eq. 16 we get a result that is identical to Eq. 14.
Response to a step function load
For a damped system we carry out the integration in Eq. 13 and add the effect of initial
conditions to obtain
(17)
The dynamic load factor which gives the ratio of dynamic displacement to the static
displacement under load is plotted in Fig. 6 as a function of where is the natural period of
the system for different values of the damping ratio.
Figure 6: Response to a step
function load.