Stochastic response of combined primary-secondary structures under seismic input

A technique for non-stationary stochastic analysis of linear combined primary and secondary subsystems subjected to a zero-mean Gaussian base excitation is presented. The proposed technique, based on the use of the Taylor's expansion in evaluating the operators which appear in the step-by-step procedure, does not require the evaluation of the complex eigenproperties of the combined system. Operating in this way, even though the numerical procedure is a conditionally stable one, appears to be more efficient than existing methods to evaluate the dynamic response of such composite systems. It is also shown that the proposed procedure is available whether the seismic input is idealized as a filtered white noise or it is defined by means of its autocorrelation function.