A method to evaluate in explicit form the spectral characteristics of the response of linear structural systems subjected to fully non-stationary processes

In the prediction of the safety of structural systems subjected to random excitations, the largest absolute value peak of stationary or non-stationary stochastic response is a useful design information. However, the exact probability distribution of the largest absolute peak is not available, also in the simplest case of stationary random excitations. In this case the most suitable approximate solution requires the evaluation of the so-called spectral moments, for stationary random excitation, and the so-called non-geometric spectral moments (or preenvelope covariances), for non-stationary excitations. In this paper a method to evaluate in explicit form the spectral characteristics of the fully non-stationary structural response of linear structural systems is presented.