Abstract
Responses of panel structures on board ships and aerospace systems under point and in-plane intensive transient excitations, originating, primarily, from near-mixed explosion and impact upon the ships are investigated and presented in this paper. The panel structures are idealized by finite elements while the intensive transient in-plane and point loads are modelled as nonstationary random processes. The latter are treated as products of modulating functions and Gaussian white noise processes. The focus of the paper is the comparison of results obtained by employing the three nodes, eighteen degree-of-freedoms (DOF) triangular bending plate element (the explicit element stiffness, mass and stability matrices of which have been derived by the authors) and the four nodes, twelve DOF Melosh-Zienkiewicz-Cheung (MZC) rectangular bending plate element. The isssues addressed are: (a) convergence and reduction of computational time by applying the eighteen DOF plate element in comparison to the MZC element, (b) the contribution of the in-plane nonstationary random excitation on the response of the discretized structures, and (c) the influence of the number of modes included in the response computation.
