NON-GAUSSIAN NOISE EFFECTS ON RELIABILITY OF MULTISTABLE SYSTEMS

For certain types of compliant structures, the designer must consider limit states associated with the onset of fluidelastic instability. Th ese limit states may include bifurcations from motion in a safe region of phase space to chaotic motion with exits (jumps) out of the safe r egion. In practice, such bifurcations occur in systems with noisy or s tochastic excitations. For a wide class of dynamical systems, a fundam ental connection between deterministic and stochastic chaos allows the application to stochastic systems of a necessary condition for the oc currence of chaos originally obtained by Melnikov for the deterministi c case, We discuss the application of this condition to obtain probabi lities that chaotic motions with jumps cannot occur in multistable sys tems excited by processes with tail-limited marginal distributions.