Copyright © 2010 Michael J. Panza. 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

The Euler-Maclaurin sun formula is applied to the infinite series Green's function solution in the space-time Laplace transform domain for the one dimensional wave equation for a string fixed at each end. The resulting approximate closed form solution is used to derive a single third order input-output ordinary differential equation to model the string dynamics. The average modal density of a plate is shown to be comparable to a string. A finite three state-space model is developed for the string and applied to the vibrations of a plate subjected to broadband random and impulse inputs. The applications include the direct problem of determining the response to a disturbance input and the inverse problem of identifying the disturbance input with a finite state observer based on the finite string model. Numerical simulations using many plate modes are obtained in the time and frequency domains and are used to compare the multimodal plate model to the finite string based model and to demonstrate how the finite string based model can be used to represent the multimodal vibrations of the plate.