Journey through chaos

Chaos is considered as one of the three major scientific revolutions of this century along with Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. It has given a new way of looking at nature. It helps a scientist to find order where earlier he found disorder. This paper explains some aspects of chaos by considering a general example and to study the behaviour of non-linear structural problem by plotting the response, Poincare map, Poincare section and Power spectrum for various values of the control parameters. The occurrence of Chaos is studied in case of four structural engineering problems. The problems are solved using MATLAB package.