Master Thesis Collaboration

This post is mostly for my university professor and graduate student friends. But everyone is welcome to respond.

I have an idea for a master thesis research project which would be of great service to industry. I want to do this project myself but lack time due to my other responsibilities.

This would involve creating and analyzing finite element models for dynamic stress analysis. Does your university have access to Nastran, Ansys or some other commercial code?

The goal is to expand upon Howard Gaberson’s stress-velocity relationship which can be used to estimate the maximum global stress of a structure from the maximum global velocity.

Gaberson and others did this for a few simple structures such as rods, beams and plates. But it needs to be done for “representative complex structures” to better characterize the bounds of the C factor in sv_velocity.pdf, equation (8). These could include L-shaped plates, plates with intermediate constraints, cylindrical shells, machined parts, etc. C would be empirical for these complex structures.

In industry, we often model complex systems as SDOF for preliminary analysis. We then calculate or measure the natural frequency. The estimated response velocity is then determined from a pseudo velocity SRS or VRS. The stress is then estimated from velocity. 

The estimated stress then guides us as to whether a detailed dynamic stress FEA is really needed. Or we could use the stress-velocity method to “sanity check” an FEA if it has already been performed.

So please let me know what you think.  I am willing to provide some funding.

Thank you,
Tom Irvine