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Page 29 From Str. Dyn & EQ Eng. - Lecture Notes - Week 1 To Week 12

Lecture Notes - Week 1 to Week 12

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Page 29 From Str. Dyn & EQ Eng. - Lecture Notes - Week 1 To Week 12

Lecture Notes - Week 1 to Week 12

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Earthquake Engineering

Equation of Motion of SDOF Elastic Systems (revisited)


1 – Introduction

Simple structures can be idealised as a system with a lumped mass m and a massless supporting
structure with stiffness k. An elevated water tank supported by a tall single concrete column is
one example. Let us assume that the energy is dissipated through a viscous damper with a
damping coefficient c. Figure 1 gives a schematic diagram of such a structure. To define the
position of the mass, only one displacement variable is needed. Thus we call this a Single Degree
of Freedom (SDOF) system.

p(t)
m u(t)

k
c

Figure 1 – SDOF system

Experiments show that structures behave in an inelastic manner. This implies that the force
corresponding to a certain deformation is not unique. It depends on the history of deformations
and whether the deformation is increasing or decreasing. In this study, we consider a linear
variation of force-deformation. This implies that the force is single valued for a given
displacement. Such a structure is said to be linear elastic.

2 – Equation of motion of SDOF elastic system

Applying a force p(t) to the mass m will induce a displacement u(t) which is being resisted by the
stiffness force and the damping force. Using Newton's second law leads to
p(t )  cu(t )  ku(t )  mu(t )
Hence the full equation of movement is given by
mu(t )  cu (t )  ku(t )  p(t )
Various cases are studied below to understand the effect of the material properties and of the
forcing term.

2.1 – Free vibration of SDOF system

The system is disturbed from its static equilibrium and then allowed to vibrate without any
external dynamic loading.

a) Undamped free vibration: the equation of motion is given by


mu  ku  0 (1)

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