Copyright © 2010 Yimin Zhang and Xianzhen Huang. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Generally speaking, a vibration system consists of three parts: vibration resource, vibration transfer path, and vibration receiver. Based on the dynamic sensitivity technique, this paper proposes a method for evaluating the contribution of each vibration transfer path to the dynamic response of the vibration receiver. Nonlinear stiffness is an important factor in causing the nonlinearity of vibration systems. Taking sensitivity as the evaluation criteria, we present an effective approach for estimating the influence of nonlinear stiffness in vibration transfer paths on the dynamic response of the vibration receiver. Using the proposed method, the sensitivity of the vibration system with multiple and/or multidimensional transfer paths could be determined in the time domain.