Curved beams are an essential structural form widely used in the engineering industry. When loaded past a critical point, they may buckle in a bifurcation or snap-through mode. Studies have shown that structural buckling problems are highly sensitive to slight changes in thermal properties. A shallow curved beam model subjected to a harmonic excitation is considered in this paper. A simplified, dimensionless one degree of freedom model is obtained following the works of [1]. Using this model, the transient dynamics of the system is analyzed for varying forcing parameters. The effect of the arch rise (λ) is also examined as the varying thermal properties effect the geometry of the beam system. Dynamic and transient dynamic responses of the system are obtained in the time domain for both constant and linearly varying λ. Wavelet analysis is utilized to analyze this data in the frequency domain and it provided an effective representation of the system responses that are localized in both time and frequency.

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