Prediction of the Transient Local Energy by Energy Finite Element Analysis

Energy finite element analysis (EFEA) has been successfully applied to steady-state response prediction over the past three decades. Compared with other energy-based methods, such as statistical energy analysis (SEA), EFEA can consider more local structural information without increasing the computational consumption too much, which makes it attractive. Inspired by the transient local energy approach (TLEA), a general transient energy balance equation was derived by assuming that the plane wave condition is satisfied. The properties of the energy balance equation were studied, and the analytical solutions with different initial conditions were provided. Utilizing the derived transient energy balance equation, transient EFEA is proposed, which has the same advantages as EFEA. A general formula is presented for the energy transmission coefficients of any number of coupled in-plane beams. The present approach was validated using a single beam and a coupled collinear beam structure under unloading conditions. The coupled collinear beams were also investigated using constant and quasi-static input power. The validation results show that TEFEA can accurately predict the local response of the structure. All of these results were compared with those of finite element analysis (FEA), simplified TEFEA (sTEFEA), transient statistical energy analysis (TSEA), and analytical formulas.