3. Modal behavior of structures

Structural vibrations can be described by continuum mechanics, but this approach only produces usable results for simple geometries. We prefer the discrete formalism, which can be derived from finite element modeling or experimental mesh discretization.

We assimilate the structure to a finite set of $N$ degrees of freedom (ddl) characterized by their displacement $q_k\left(t\right)$ . The state of the structure is then defined by the vector $\left\{q\left(t\right)\right\}$...