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Determination of the regions of dynamic instability has been an important issue for elastic structures. Under the extreme climate, the external load acting on structures is becoming more and more complicated, which can induce dynamic instability of elastic structures. In this study, we explore the dynamic instability and response characteristics of simply supported beams under multi-harmonic parametric excitation. A numerical approach for determining the instability regions under multi-harmonic parametric excitation is developed here by examining the eigenvalues of characteristic exponents of the monodromy matrix based on the Floquet theorem, and the fourth-order Runge–Kutta method is used to calculate the dynamic responses. The accuracy of the method is verified by the comparison with classical approximate boundary formulas of dynamic instability regions. The numerical results reveal that Bolotin’s approximate formulas are only applicable to the low-order instability regions with a small value of the excitation parameter of simple parametric resonance. Multi-harmonic parametric excitation can significantly change the dynamic instability regions, it may cause parametric resonance on beams for longitudinal complex periodic loads. The influence of frequency and number of multiply harmonics on the parametrically excited vibration of the beam is explored. High-order harmonics with low-frequency have positive effects on the stable response characteristics for multi-harmonic parametric excitation. This paper provides a new perspective for the vibration suppression of parametric excitation. The developed procedure can be used for multi-degree-of-freedom (MDOF) systems under complex excitation (e.g. tsunami waves and strong winds).

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