Nonlinear problems

The Stress-Rang e Concept. The solution of the problem of the rigid system is based on the linear relationship between stress and strain. This relationship allows the superposition of the effects of many iadividual forces and moments. If the relationship between stress and strain is nonlinear, an elementary problem, such as a siagle-plane two-member system, can be solved but only with considerable difficulty. Most practical piping systems do, ia fact, have stresses that are initially ia the nonlinear range. Using linear analysis ia an apparendy nonlinear problem is justified by the stress-range concept... 

The theories of elastic and viscoelastic materials can be obtained as particular cases of the theory of materials with memory. This theory enables the description of many important mechanical phenomena, such as elastic instability and phenomena accompanying wave propagation. The applicability of the methods of the third approach is, on the other hand, limited to linear problems. It does not seem likely that further generalization to nonlinear problems is possible within the framework of the assumptions of this approach. The results obtained concern problems of linear viscoelasticity. 

Introduction.—Although the nonlinear problems appeared from the very beginning of mechanics (the end of the 18th century), very little had been accomplished throughout the 19th century, mainly because there was no general mathematical method and each individual problem had to be treated on its own merits. 

Autonomous (A) Versus Nonautonomous (NA) Problems. Practically all nonlinear problems of the theory of oscillations reduce to the differential equation of the form... 

This situation may be visualized as follows. There exists a family of solutions (depending on parameters M0 and N0) to which the actual generating solution of the nonlinear problem belongs and conditions (6-70) guarantee that out of that family one unique solution is selected which is precisely the generating solution of the nonlinear equation (6-63). 

We have entered into some details of the method of Poincar6 because it opened an entirely new approach to nonlinear problems encountered in applications. Moreover, the method is very general, since by taking more terms in the series solution (6-65), one can obtain approximations of higher order. However, the drawback of the method is its complexity, which resulted in efforts being directed toward a simplification of the calculating procedure. 

The program can solve both steady-state problems as well as time-dependent problems, and has provisions for both linear and nonlinear problems. The boundary conditions and material properties can vary with time, temperature, and position. The property variation with position can be a straight line function or or a series of connected straight line functions. User-written Fortran subroutines can be used to implement more exotic changes of boundary conditions, material properties, or to model control systems. The program has been implemented on MS DOS microcomputers, VAX computers, and CRAY supercomputers. The present work used the MS DOS microcomputer implementation. 

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