Local Similarity in Nonlinear Random Vibration

A response analysis procedure is developed for oscillators with highly nonlinear stiffness and light nonlinear damping excited by non-white wide-band random noise based on local similarity between the random response and the deterministic response at the same energy level of the corresponding undamped oscillator. The analysis consists of three parts: introduction of modified phase plane variables, derivation of an approximate general form of the probability density of the response energy. for non-white excitation, and derivation of the spectral density function of the response from the conditional covariance function for a given energy level. The use of modified phase plane variables leads to a completely symmetric formulation and reformulates the stiffness nonlinearity as a nonlinear variation of the instantaneous angular frequency, and thereby a local rescaling of time. The probability density is obtained by averaging the full Fokker-Plank-Kolmogorov equation using local similarity, thus avoiding some theoretical problems associated with the traditional averaging of the stochastic differential equations. The use of local similarity with the exact undamped solution in the derivation of the conditional spectral density leads to a spectral density estimate, that contains the higher harmonic components explicitly. Comparisons of theoretical predictions with digital simulation estimates of both the probability and spectral densities for the Duffing oscillator demonstrate the accuracy of the theory.