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Extended from the classic Rayleigh damping model in structural dynamics, the Caughey damping model allows the damping ratios to be specified in multiple modes while satisfying the orthogonality conditions. Despite these desirable properties, Caughey damping suffers from a few major drawbacks: depending on the frequency distribution of the significant modes, it can be difficult to choose the reference frequencies that ensure reasonable values for all damping ratios corresponding to the significant modes; it cannot ensure all damping ratios are positive. This paper aims to present a constrained quadratic programming approach to address these issues.

The new method minimizes the error of the structural displacement peak based on the response spectrum theory, while all modal damping ratios are constrained to be greater than zero.

Several comprehensive examples are presented to demonstrate the accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed method, and comparisons with existing approaches are provided whenever possible.

The proposed method is highly efficient and allows the damping ratios to be conveniently specified for all significant modes, producing optimal damping coefficients in practical applications.

To provide an approach to active vibration reduction of flexible spacecraft actuated by on‐off thrusters during attitude control for spacecraft designers, which can help them analysis and design the attitude control system.

The new approach includes attitude controller acting on the rigid hub, designed by using pulse‐width pulse‐frequency modulation integrated with component command technique, and the piezoelectric material elements as sensors/actuators bonded on the surface of the beam appendages for active vibration suppression of flexible appendages, designed by optimal positive position feedback (OPPF) control technique. The OPPF compensator is devised by setting up a cost function to be minimized by feedback gains, which are subject to the stability criterion at the same time, and an extension to the conventional positive position feedback control design approach is investigated.

Numerical simulations for the flexible spacecraft show that the precise attitude control and vibration suppression can be accomplished using the derived vibration attenuator and attitude control controller.

Studies on how to control the on‐off actuated system under impulse disturbances are left for future work.

An effective method is proposed for the spacecraft engineers planning to design attitude control system for actively suppressing the vibration and at the same time quickly and precisely responding to the attitude control command.

The advantage in this scheme is that the controllers are designed separately, allowing the two objectives to be satisfied independently of one another. It fulfils a useful source of theoretical analysis for the attitude control system design and offers practical help for the spacecraft designers.

A general time domain finite element formulation and several efficient numerical techniques are combined to form a new method of analysis for the solution of three‐dimensional soil‐structure interaction problems in the time domain. For elastic systems the method is a very cost effective alternative to the frequency domain approach. However, the major advantage of the new method is its ability to be extended to non‐linear behaviour such as separation of foundation and soil or non‐linear material. The general equations of motion for the linear cases are expressed in terms of the relative displacements of the soil‐structure system with respect to the displacements of the buried part of the structure (volume methods). This formulation allows the load vector to be an exclusive function of the free field accelerations at the foundation level. The non‐linear case requires that the equation of motion be established in terms of the total interaction displacements. The soil is modelled with three‐dimensional solid elements in the near field and axisymmetric elements in the far field. Coupling between the two systems is enforced by expanding the displacements of the solid elements in terms of the axisymmetric ones. Reduction in the number of degrees of freedom is achieved by the use of orthogonal sets of Ritz functions. The reduced system of equations is uncoupled and solved very efficiently using the complex eigenvectors. A numerical example consisting of the response of a structure resting on a homogeneous half‐space is solved using the new method and one of the approaches in the frequency domain. Results given by both methods are remarkably similar.

In the dynamical analysis of engineering systems, running a detailed high‐resolution finite element model can be expensive even for obtaining the dynamic response at few frequency points. To address this problem, this paper aims to investigate the possibility of representing the output of an expensive computer code as a Gaussian stochastic process.

The Gaussian process emulator method is discussed and then applied to both simulated and experimentally measured data from the frequency response of a cantilever plate excited by a harmonic force. The dynamic response over a frequency range is approximated using only a small number of response values, obtained both by running a finite element model at carefully selected frequency points and from experimental measurements. The results are then validated applying some adequacy diagnostics.

It is shown that the Gaussian process emulator method can be an effective predictive tool for medium and high‐frequency vibration problems, whenever the data are expensive to obtain, either from a computer‐intensive code or a resource‐consuming experiment.

Although Gaussian process emulators have been used in other disciplines, there is no knowledge of it having been implemented for structural dynamic analyses and it has good potential for this area of engineering.

The evaluation of linear dynamic response analysis of large structures by vector superposition requires, in its traditional formulation, the solution of a large and expensive eigenvalue problem. A method of solution based on a Ritz transformation to a reduced system of generalized coordinates using load dependent vectors generated from the spatial distribution of the dynamic loads is shown to maintain the high expected accuracy of modern computer analysis and significantly reduces the execution time over eigensolution procedures. New computational variants to generate load dependent vectors are presented and error norms are developed to control the convergence characteristics of load dependent Ritz solutions. Numerical applications on simple structural systems are used to show the relative efficiency of the proposed solution procedures.

This paper presents a new discretization technique of the hydrodynamic energy balance model based on a finite‐element formulation. The concept of heat source lumping is introduced, and the thermal conductivity model includes the effect of varying both carrier concentrations and temperatures. The energy balance equation is formulated to account for kinetic energy as a convective flow. The new discretization method has the advantage that it allows for assembling the functions out of elementary variables available over elements instead of along element links. Therefore, theoretically, calculation of the Jacobian should be three times faster than by the classic method. Results are given for three examples. The method suffers from mathematical instabilities, but provides a good basis for future work to solve these problems.

A numerical implementation of a discretization scheme of the hydrodynamic model for submicron devices is described and applied to a one‐dimensional ballistic diode. The performance of the numerical method and the physical results of the simulation for different biases and lattice temperatures, and a brief comparison to Monte Carlo simulations, are also given.

This paper aims to present an approach for calibrating the numerical models of dynamical systems that have spatially localized nonlinear components. The approach implements the extended constitutive relation error (ECRE) method using multi-harmonic coefficients and is conceived to separate the errors in the representation of the global, linear and local, nonlinear components of the dynamical system through a two-step process.

The first step focuses on the system’s predominantly linear dynamic response under a low magnitude periodic excitation. In this step, the discrepancy between measured and predicted multi-harmonic coefficients is calculated in terms of residual energy. This residual energy is in turn used to spatially locate errors in the model, through which one can identify the erroneous model inputs which govern the linear behavior that need to be calibrated. The second step involves measuring the system’s nonlinear dynamic response under a high magnitude periodic excitation. In this step, the response measurements under both low and high magnitude excitation are used to iteratively calibrate the identified linear and nonlinear input parameters.

When model error is present in both linear and nonlinear components, the proposed iterative combined multi-harmonic balance method (MHB)-ECRE calibration approach has shown superiority to the conventional MHB-ECRE method, while providing more reliable calibration results of the nonlinear parameter with less dependency on a priori knowledge of the associated linear system.

This two-step process is advantageous as it reduces the confounding effects of the uncertain model parameters associated with the linear and locally nonlinear components of the system.

A generalized time finite element method is considered for time integration of non‐linear equations of motion arising from dynamic problems. A simple three‐time level family of schemes is obtained. Evaluation of the schemes shows that the proposed approach may lead to unconditionally stable algorithms for non‐linear problems. Numerical examples show the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed algorithm in comparison to Newmark's average acceleration method and four order accurate explicit algorithm.

The purpose of this paper is to set up a consistent off‐equilibrium thermodynamic theory to deal with the self‐heating of electronic nano‐devices.

From the Bloch‐Boltzmann‐Peierls kinetic equations for the coupled system formed by electrons and phonons, an extended hydrodynamic model (HM) has been obtained on the basis of the maximum entropy principle. An electrothermal Monte Carlo (ETMC) simulator has been developed to check the above thermodynamic model.

A 1D n⁺−n−n⁺ silicon diode has been simulated by using the extended HM and the ETMC simulator, confirming the general behaviour.

The paper's analysis is limited to the 1D case. Future researches will also consider 2D realistic devices.

The non‐equilibrium character of electrons and phonons has been taken into account. In previous works, this methodology was used only for equilibrium phonons.