Force limited vibration testing: An evaluation of the computation of C2 for real load and probabilistic source

To prevent over-testing of the test-item during random vibration testing Scharton proposed and discussed the force limited random vibration testing (FLVT) in a number of publications. Besides the random vibration specification, the total mass and the turn-over frequency of the load (test item), is a very important parameter for FLVT. A number of computational methods to estimate are described in the literature, i.e., the simple and the complex two degrees of freedom system, STDFS and CTDFS, respectively. The motivation of this work is to evaluate the method for the computation of a realistic value of to perform a representative random vibration test based on force limitation, when the adjacent structure (source) description is more or less unknown. Marchand discussed the formal description of getting , using the maximum PSD of the acceleration and maximum PSD of the force, both at the interface between load and source. Stevens presented the coupled systems modal approach (CSMA), where simplified asparagus patch models (parallel-oscillator representation) of load and source are connected, consisting of modal effective masses and the spring stiffness's associated with the natural frequencies. When the random acceleration vibration specification is given the CSMA method is suitable to compute the value of the parameter . When no mathematical model of the source can be made available, estimations of the value can be find in literature. In this paper a probabilistic mathematical representation of the unknown source is proposed, such that the asparagus patch model of the source can be approximated. The chosen probabilistic design parameters have a uniform distribution. The computation of the value can be done in conjunction with the CSMA method, knowing the apparent mass of the load and the random acceleration specification at the interface between load and source, respectively. Data of two cases available from literature have been analyzed and discussed to get more knowledge about the applicability of the probabilistic method