NOISE-INDUCED SNAP-THROUGH OF A BUCKLED COLUMN WITH CONTINUOUSLY DISTRIBUTED MASS - A CHAOTIC DYNAMICS APPROACH

For a spatially-extended dynamical system we illustrate the use of a c haotic dynamics approach to obtain criteria on the occurrence of noise -induced escapes from a preferred region of phase space. Our system is a buckled column with continuous mass, subjected to a transverse cont inuously distributed load that varies randomly with time. We obtain a stochastic counterpart of the Melnikov necessary condition for chaos-a nd snap-through-derived by Holmes and Mardsen for the harmonic loading case. Our approach yields a lower bound for the probability that snap -through cannot occur during a specified time interval. In particular, for excitations with finite-tailed marginal distribution, a simple cr iterion is obtained that guarantees the non-occurrence of snap-through . Copyright (C) 1996 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.