Unconditional Stability in Numerical Time Integration Methods

Methods of numerical time integration of the equation M¯q¨ + K¯q = f are examined in this paper. A particular class of explicit time integration methods is defined and this class is searched for an unconditionally stable method. The class is found to contain no such method and, furthermore, is found to contain no method with a larger stable time step size than that characterized by the simple central difference time integration method.