Amplitude bounds of linear forced vibrations

For reasons of safety and reliability, the maximum amplitudes of vibration responses must be taken into account in engineering. The exact maximum amplitudes are available from solving linear differential equations. However, for large scale systems, it requires too much computation time to be useful. Therefore, simple amplitude bounds are of great interest for engineers. Up to now, only for classically damped linear systems, some approximate amplitude bounds were presented. In this paper, amplitude bounds of linear forced vibrations are presented for general damped linear vibrating systems. For transient, harmonic and step excitations, the presented amplitude bounds show simple relations to the system parameters, and are easy to calculate. The advantage is the possibility to judge the level of vibrations, and to choose appropriate parameters at design. Compared with the approximate underestimating amplitude bounds available in literature, the presented amplitude bounds are overestimating the maximum amplitude and, therefore, can be safely applied to general damped vibrating systems.