Abstract
The symbolic manipulation code
macsyma is applied in this paper to five problems in the field of random vibrations of mechanical systems. These include cumulants of a distribution, single degree of freedom deterministic and random parameter oscillator excited by an external colored noise random force, the infinite degree of freedom beam under space-wise random loading, and a differential equation of order
N with random coefficients. In these cases, application of
macsyma is shown to greatly extend the researcher's ability to derive closed-form or approximate analytical solutions. In more complicated problems such as the single degree of freedom system with stiffness treated as a stationary random forcing function, and subjected to random excitation,
macsyma is applied to transform intermediate analytical results into a
fortran code for subsequent numerical analysis.