Random vibrations with MACSYMA (Q1073638)

The symbolic manipulation code MACSYMA is applied in this paper to five problems in the field of random vibrations of mechanical systems. These include cumulants of a distribution, single degree of freedom deterministic and random parameter oscillator excited by an external colored noise random force, the infinite degree of freedom beam under space-wise random loading, and a differential equation of order N with random coefficients. In these cases, application of MACSYMA is shown to greatly extend the researcher's ability to derive closed-form or approximate analytical solutions. In more complicated problems such as the single degree of freedom system with stiffness treated as a stationary random forcing function, and subjected to random excitation, MACSYMA is applied to transform intermediate analytical results into a FORTRAN code for subsequent numerical analysis.