A Shell station on a Huntsville, Alabama arterial. Four slender columns, a flat deck roughly 60 feet by 30 feet, fifteen feet of clearance, and a fascia band carrying the brand colors. It is one of the most repeated structural forms in North America, and… Read more
Structural Dynamics Series — Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport (DTW), McNamara Terminal, Concourse A DTW McNamara Terminal, Concourse A. The exposed roof structure combines arched panels, downward flying struts, and lateral tie rods. Introduction The McNamara Terminal at Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport opened on… Read more
A new paper from Hamburg University of Applied Sciences proposes an elegantly simple field method — add mass, watch the resonance shift — to quantify how structurally integrated a battery pack is in a vehicle. The modal mass estimate at its core draws on a… Read more
On the evening of 24 June 2026, northern Venezuela was struck by two major earthquakes 39 seconds apart — a rare “doublet” that became the country’s deadliest natural disaster in a generation. For the structural dynamics community, the event is a case study in nearly… Read more
The NASA/JPL Environmental Test Laboratory (ETL) developed and built a tunable beam shock test bench based on a design from Sandia National Laboratory many years ago. ETL has been using this test system successfully since October 2008. The excitation is provided by a projectile driven… Read more
Kinetic & strain energy formulas can be used as a basis for Rayleigh-Ritz or finite element analysis of vibrating structures. Equations for common structures and loading conditions are given in strain_energy.pdf The cases include: Uniform Bar under a Constant Axial Load Bar under a General Axial… Read more
A function for calculating the natural frequencies and mode shapes for an elastic beam undergoing rotation is given in: Matlab script: Vibrationdata Signal Analysis Package The function can be accessed via: >> vibrationdata > Miscellaneous > Structural Dynamics > Beam Bending FEA > Rotating Beam,… Read more
A function for calculating the natural frequencies and mode shapes for an elastic beam supported by end springs is included in: Matlab script: Vibrationdata Signal Analysis Package The function can be accessed via: >> vibrationdata > Miscellaneous > Structural Dynamics > Beam Bending > Beam… Read more
Here is a paper which gives a derivation of the mass and stiffness matrices for beam bending: beam_FEM.pdf * * * Here is a Matlab script for the modal analysis of a straight beam. beam.zip * * * Here is Matlab script for the modal… Read more
Shock and vibration environments produce dynamic stresses which can cause material failure in structures. The potential failure modes include fatigue, yielding, and ultimate stress limit. F.V. Hunt wrote a seminal paper on this subject, titled “Stress and Stress Limits on the Attainable Velocity in Mechanical… Read more