Abstract

Conventional vibration testing of aerospace hardware is normally performed by controlling the acceleration input to the base of a test item to the specifications, namely the envelope of the acceleration peaks of the flight environment. In the nineties, NASA JPL led the development and implementation of an improved method called Force Limited Vibration (FLV) testing. In addition to controlling the input acceleration, the FLV testing measures and limits the reaction forces between the test item and the shaker. This force limiting technique results in acceleration notching at predominant natural frequencies of the test item. Due to its partly empirical nature, the crucial coefficient, C 2 , still requires some judgment for its selection. Although the semiempirical method is very powerful and has been implemented successfully on several space missions, there is still some work required to realize it and make it acceptable to everyone. The objective of this study is to present a comprehensive and complete analytical and experimental investigation on the semi-empirical method.