Dynamic stability of skew plates subjected to aerodynamic and random in-plane forces

This paper presents an investigation into the dynamic stability of skew plates acted upon simultaneously by an aerodynamic force in the chordwise direction and a random in-plane force in the spanwise direction. Due to this random in-plane force, the plate may become unstable before the aerodynamic force reaches its critical value. In this work, the finite element formulation is applied to obtain the discretized system equations. The system equations are then partially uncoupled and reduced in size by the modal truncation method. Finally, the unsmoothed and the smoothed versions of the stochastic averaging are used to calculate the system response, and the second-moment stability criterion is utilized to determine the stability boundary of the system. Numerical results show that the stability boundary obtained by the smoothed stochastic averaging is less conservative than that obtained by the unsmoothed version, and the former is the tangent of the latter at zero spectral density of the random in-plane force. (C) 2002 Academic Press.