Nonstationary random vibration of vehicles on irregular guideways.

Vehicles travelling at variable speed over irregular guideways are generally investiga- d by a nonstationary stochastic analysis. Up to now the vari- ances of the vehicle res- nse are gained from a matrix differential equation. In this paper a modification of the excitation process description is proposed which yields a substantial simplification: the resulting covariance analysis can be re- duced to the solution of linear algebraic matrix equations which are solved by trans- formation techniques. An example demonstrates the application, the quality and the advan- tages of the developed approximation method compared with the conventional exact analy- sis. The formulation holds for linear time- invariant multiaxle vehicle systems.