DYNAMICS OF A SIMPLY SUPPORTED TWO PARALLEL BEAMS WITH VARIABLE ELASTIC INTERCONNECTED LAYER UNDER A MOVING MASS

Abstract

In the paper, dynamics of two parallel beams which is interconnected through a nonlinear variable viscoelastic Winkler-type layer under a moving concentrated load is investigated. The elastic characteristics of a simply supported Euler-Bernoulli beam system have been applied. The motion characteristics due to force of excitation on the system is described by a coupled governing fourth order partial differential equations of motion with variable coefficient. A solution scheme involving seperable method have been applied to obtain a coupled coupled second order ordinary differential equations. The decoupling and simplification of the coupled system yields an uncoupled sets of second order ordinary differential equations and this has been attained using an asymptotic method of Struble. A semi analytic differential transform method is applied to solve the resulting equations. A numerical experiment is explored to demonstrate the simplicity and efficiency of the method employed. The effects of various parameters including speed of the moving load, inertia of the moving load, stiffness and viscoelastic parameters of the interconnected layer were obtained. The result indicates that increasing the load mass has caused a decrease in the response amplitude of deflection of the two beams and this is found to be in good agreement with the existing results.