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PREFACE:
Our experience of over 30 years of teaching structural dynamics has demonstrated to us that, more often than not, novice students of structural dynamics find the subject foreign and difficult to understand. The main objective of this book is to overcome this hurdle and provide a textbook that is easy to understand and relatively short—a book that can be used as an efficient tool for teaching a first course on the subject without overwhelming the students who are just beginning their study of structural dynamics.
There is no shortage of good and comprehensive textbooks on structural dynamics, and once the student has mastered the basics of the subject, he or she can more efficiently navigate the more complex and intricate subjects in this field. This book may also prove useful as a reference for practicing engineers who are not familiar with structural dynamics or those who want a better understanding of the various code provisions that are based on the dynamic response of structures and/or components.
This book is also perhaps unique in that it integrates MATLAB applications throughout. Example problems are generally worked by hand and then followed by MATLAB algorithms and solutions of the same. This will help students solve more problems without getting bogged down in extensive hand calculations that would otherwise be necessary.
It will also let students experiment with changing various parameters of a dynamic problem and get a feel for how changing various parameters will affect the outcome. Extensive use is made of the graphics in MATLAB to make the concept of dynamic response real. We decided to use MATLAB in many of the examples in the book because (1) it is a very powerful tool, (2) it is easy to use, and (3) a free or nominally priced “student version” is available to virtually all engineering students.
We have consciously decided not to include a tutorial on basic MATLAB operations simply because such information is readily available within the help files supplied with MATLAB and in the documentation that is shipped with the student version of MATLAB.More than 20 years ago, it was decided that, because of the seismic risk in California and the fact that at that time most of our undergraduate students came from California, a course titled “Introduction to Structural Dynamics” was needed. This course was intended for seniors and firstyear graduate students in structural engineering.
During this time period, much has changed in this important area of study. There has been a tremendous change in both computational hardware and software, which are now readily available to students.
Much has also been learned from the occurrence of major earthquakes in various locations around the world and the recorded data that have been obtained from these earthquakes, including both building data and free field data.
This book attempts to draw on and reflect these changes to the extent practical and useful to its intended audience.The book is conceptually composed of three parts. The first part, consisting of Chapters 1 to 6, covers the basic concepts and dynamic response of single-degree-of-freedom systems to various excitations.
The second part, consisting of Chapters 7 and 8, covers the linear and nonlinear response of multiple-degree-of-freedom systems to various excitations. Finally, the third part, consisting of Chapter 9 and the Appendix, deals with the linear and nonlinear response of structures subjected to earthquake ground motions and structural dynamics–related code provisions for assessing the seismic response of structures.
It is anticipated that for a semester-long introductory course on structural dynamics, Chapters 1 to 7 with selected sections of the other chapters will be covered in the classroom.
