Abstracts Archive

Curvilinear reinforcement fibres allow tailoring the elastic properties of composite laminates in space, leading to Variable Stiffness Composite Laminates (VSCL). This work intends to analyse if variable stiffness composites can be used to increase the critical aerodynamic pressure, under which aero...

Quasi-zero stiffness (QZS) isolators exploit the kinematic nonlinearity to increase the vibration attenuation with respect to a linear suspension. This paper presents an experimental study on a quasi-zero stiffness QZS isolator under base excitations. Stepped-sine tests have been performed to charac...

Engineering applications have conventionally aimed to avoid phenomena related to mechanical instabilities or buckling, as they can bring undesired nonlinear effects or even failure. In recent years however the research in this field has experienced an inversion of direction making use of such phenom...

Recent decades have witnessed a new interest in the field of structural stability due to the use of multistable systems in several applications such as vibration control, energy harvesting, deployable and collapsible structures, micro- and nanocomponents and the development of metamaterials, among o...

The present work is concerned with the dynamic instabilities arising when a circular cylindrical shell containing a dense fluid is subjected to a seismic excitation of harmonic type. Typical Fluid Structure Interaction studies focused on the interactions between elastic structures and fluids are foc...

Non-linear dynamical systems of different areas of engineering and technology are subject to parameters that should most of the times be realistically modelled as random variables, although they are usually considered to be deterministic. This paper addresses in a simple, almost naïve fashion, the ...

In this work, Koiter’s theory is applied to study the nonlinear large amplitude vibrations of simply supported shallow spherical panels. The nonlinear equations of motion are determined by using the Rayleigh-Ritz method in an energetic approach. The displacement fields are approximated using an ex...

With the increasing demand for energy consumption in recent years, several areas of science have been looking to produce clean and renewable energy. In this context, several devices are used, such as converting mechanical movement of sea waves, portal frame systems, and so on Nowadays, with the ener...

This work evaluates the nonlinear dynamic behavior and dynamic instability of an imperfect cylindrical panel with a discontinuous unilateral elastic base. The cylindrical panel is described by Donnell’s nonlinear shallow shell theory, being discretized by the Galerkin method, using a previous redu...

We investigate the steady configuration of a visco-elastic belt drive and its loss of stability under varying driving speed. The belt is considered as a linearly visco-elastic slender beam with small bending stiffness. Due to the presence of the small damping parameter and the small bending stiffnes...