ASA 128th Meeting - Austin, Texas - 1994 Nov 28 .. Dec 02

3pSA1. Wave propagation in truss structures.

Yueping Guo

Dept. of Ocean Eng., MIT, Cambridge, MA 02139

A wave-based approach is used to study truss vibrations. Each truss member is treated as a wave-bearing system so that the number of unknowns is the same as the number of wave types, independent of the physical dimension and frequency. A global matrix system is then formed to solve the overall problem, which, because of the wave approach used for the truss members, is very sparse and numerically absolutely stable. Thus even large-scale trusses can be studied with computation that is almost trivial. An example is given for a truss with 35 joints, connecting 109 beams, which is also used in our experimental studies. Results are obtained to discuss features such as pass/stop bands, modal density, and energy sharing between different wave types. [Work supported by ONR.]