Compression after Impact Testing of Composite Laminates Specimens

Figure 1.  Boeing 787 Aircraft Carbon fiber/epoxy laminates are widely used in aeronautic and aerospace structural components mainly because of their excellent specific mechanical properties.  These laminates show mechanical properties similar or higher than the conventional metallic materials in terms of strength-to-weight and stiffness-to-weight ratios.  The… Read more

Sine Sweep vs. Random for Pre and Post Testing

Certain equipment must be designed and tested to withstand vibration.  This is common in the automotive, aerospace, military and other industries.    The equipment is typically mounted to a shaker table and then subjected to a base input random or sine sweep vibration test.   The random… Read more

Seismic Test & Analysis Webinars

This is a work-in-progress… I am creating a series of webinars with Matlab exercises for seismic testing. Here are the slides. Telcordia Technologies Generic Requirements GR-63-CORE:  Bellcore_GR_63_Core.ppt This unit contains an alternative waveform for VERTEQII. CEI.IEC 980, Recommended practices for seismic qualification of electrical equipment… Read more

Satellite Equipment Vibration Testing

Stentor Satellite Equipment mounted in satellites must withstand acoustic-driven random vibration at liftoff and during the transonic and maximum dynamic pressure phases of flight.   The equipment must be designed and test accordingly. The equipment is mounted on shaker tables for the random vibration testing,… Read more

JPL Tunable Shock Beam

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

Relative Displacement from Two Accelerometer Time Histories

Assume that input and response acceleration PSDs have been measured.  The corresponding displacement PSDs can be readily calculated. But the relative displacement cannot be calculated accurately because the phase angles are discarded in the PSD calculation. The best method is to perform the relative displacement… Read more