A Closed-form Approximation for Impulse Response of Fractionally Damped Oscillators

Abstract

We consider a fractionally damped oscillator, where the damping term is expressed by the Caputo fractional derivative of order $\beta\in (0,1).$ The impulse response of this oscillator can be expressed in terms of the bivariate Mittag-Leffler function consisting of a double infinite series. Although this series is uniformly convergent, its numerical implementation suffers from computational instabilities. In this contribution, we propose an approximate closed-form solution that avoids these numerical pitfalls while maintaining a reasonable accuracy. The resulting approximation is computationally efficient and robust, making it suitable for practical engineering applications.