Abstract
An approach is presented for generating energy-like functionals for linear elastic dynamic systems on a Hilbert space. The objective is to obtain a family of functionals which may be used for stability analysis of the equilibrium; i.e., Liapunov functionals. Although the energy functional, when one exists, is always a member of this family, the family is shown to exist even when an energy functional does not. Several discrete and distributed-parameter examples are presented, as are certain specific techniques for utilizing this approach.

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