Random Mobility Variation of Disordered Periodic Structures
Abstract Due to material, geometric and manufacturing irregularities, a structure designed to be spatially periodic cannot be exactly periodic. The departure from perfect periodicity is referred to as disorder, and it is known to cause spatial localization of normal modes and attenuation of wave propagation even if the structure is undamped. In this paper, another effect of disorder is investigated; namely, possible energy concentration near where a excitation is applied, thus, inducing higher level of structure response, A computational procedure is developed for calculating the mobility, or mechanical admittance, of deterministically disordered periodic structures based on wave propagation theory, and then extended to the case of randomly disordered periodic structures. It is shown that, given the probability distribution of the disordered parameters of a periodic structure, the mean and standard deviation of the mobility magnitude can be obtained. The results are exact if the number of the periodic cell units is not large, and approximate if the number is large. Depending on the excitation frequency, the mean mobility magnitude of a disordered system may be either greater or smaller than that of the perfectly periodic counterpart.