Approximation for Determining Harmonically Excited Response of Nonclassically Damped Systems

The straightforward task of generating response plots for harmonically excited, nonclassically damped systems involves substantial computation. A current approximate approach based on classical analysis reduces computation but is shown to perform poorly in resonance regions when resonances are closely spaced. An improved approximation also based on classical analysis is developed and is shown to behave well in these regions for a numerical example. An inquiry concerning a -œbest- diagonalizable damping representation leads to a frequency dependent, load distribution dependent damping matrix that may in some cases aid computation and support visualization