The dynamical system considered in this paper is an inelastic beam whose supports are subjected to a harmonic excitation. This paper first explores whether the system has chaotic motion. The appearance of the irregular time history, strange attractor on the Poincaré map as well as period-doubling bifurcation phenomenon strongly indicates that chaos indeed exist in this system. After finding the chaos phenomenon, this paper continues to investigate the relationship between the decay time of the autocorrelation function and the largest Lyapunov exponent. The Poincaré mapping points are chosen to be the sampled function of the discrete autocorrelation function. It's found that a power model of regression analysis can fit with good accuracy the data points, which are composed of the mapping times for the autocorrelation to decay into the square of the mean of the Poincaré points and the corresponding largest Lyapunov exponent.
