
Welcome to this section on General Dynamic Excitation. At this point we’re going to focus on giving you some tools to perform practical real-world dynamic analyses.

We’ll start of by motivating our study of general dynamic loading with a brief case study discussion of human-induced vibration on the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol. This case study highlights the need to have a more versatile dynamic analysis technique in your toolbox.

That technique is the Piecewise-Exact numerical solution method. This is a hugely versatile numerical solution technique that will equip you with the ability to go beyond harmonic excitation and simulate the influence of any time-varying force.

We’ll develop the concept, then implement an algorithm in a Jupyter Notebook. We’ll conclude this section by exploring some of the practical considerations when implementing this and any numerical solution technique.


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