Transient response of Bouc–Wen hysteretic system under random excitation via RBFNN method

Abstract

Hysteresis normally exhibited by mechanical systems and materials is so prevalent that its response prediction under random excitation has been extensively investigated for decades. Nevertheless, the transient solution of the response, which is crucial for assessing the system’s reliability, is still a challenging topic that requires additional development. To this regard, this work proposes a semi-analytical method using the radial basis function neural network (RBFNN) to attain the transient probability density distribution of the randomly excited Bouc–Wen system. Specifically, the trial solution of the corresponding FPK equation is configured as the RBFNN with undetermined time-varying weight coefficients. By discretizing the time derivative with the Euler difference method, a loss function with time recurrence is derived and minimized to yield the time-varying optimal weight coefficients through the optimization method. Additionally, an optimized sampling strategy is adopted to reduce the burden of calculation. Finally, the Bouc–Wen hysteretic systems with softening and hardening nonlinearity are considered to investigate the performance of the adopted technique. The numerical results have shown that the evaluation process of the probability density functions(PDFs) can be captured well with sufficient accuracy and efficiency. The proposed efficient sampling technique can provide considerable efficiency improvement for the medium dimension system. The work of the paper will contribute to the reliability design of hysteretic structures in engineering.