On a critique of a numerical scheme for the calculation of fractionally damped dynamical systems

Recently Yuan and Agrawal [L. Yuan and O.P. Agrawal, A numerical scheme for dynamic systems containing fractional derivatives, Journal of Vibration and Acoustics 124 (2002) 321–324] presented a new numerical scheme to calculate the dynamic response of mechanical systems, the damping forces of which are described by fractional derivatives. When solving the resulting equation of motion by time integration, it is necessary to store the entire displacement history of the system due to the non-local character of the fractional derivatives. The cited scheme appears to overcome this drawback by transforming the equation of motion with the fractional term into a set of ordinary differential equations. It can be shown that this scheme is equivalent to a classical spring-dashpot representation and thus does not imply the benefits derived from fractional-derivative models. In addition, it is less flexible and incorrectly predicts the asymptotic behavior.