Transverse vibration analysis of plane trusses by analytical method

The type of plane truss considered in this paper is the Warren truss, which is built up with basic units consisting of four sets of bars pin-jointed at the nodes and subjected to transverse nodal loads. The natural vibration and dynamic response are studied for the simply supported truss with lumped masses at the nodes. Closed form solutions are deduced by using the U-transformation technique which leads to the uncoupling of the governing equations. In order to explain the procedure of the present method, the response functions for the nodal displacements of a truss subjected to the action of a suddenly applied load at a node are derived. It is obvious that the present method is also applicable to the forced vibration analysis of trusses subjected to arbitrary transverse loads applied at the nodes.