| The focus of this investigation is on the prediction of the fatigue life of aircraft panels subject to thermal effects and a severe random acoustic excitation. The prototypical equations for this problem, i.e. the single and double well Duffing oscillators subjected to a bandlimited white noise, are first considered. A review of some currently available spectral approaches, i.e. the Rayleigh approximation and the single spectral moment method both with and without Gaussianity correction, strongly suggests that an accurate prediction of the fatigue life for this nonlinear system requires a dedicated model. To this end, an approximation of the probability density function of the peaks of the stationary response of the Duffing oscillators is derived. This model is then used in conjunction with either a narrowband assumption or the single spectral moment methodology to yield a prediction of the fatigue life. The application of this approach to simulation data from a single/double well Duffing oscillator, as well as on the experimental response of an unbuckled panel, demonstrates the reliability of this novel approximation.; Spectral approaches typically make use of the values of specific spectral moments and thus their application necessitates the availability of a reliable approximation of the power spectral density of the response considered (displacement or stress). Although of fundamental importance, the determination of the power spectrum of the response of nonlinear systems is a very difficult problem and it is only recently that successful techniques have been devised to estimate this function. Two such approaches are assessed here for the single degree of freedom Duffing oscillator and are modified to improve their accuracy and ease of use. |
