Validation of a virtual shaker testing approach for improving environmental testing performance

In the field of vibration testing, the interaction between the structure being tested and the instrumentation hardware used to perform the test is a critical issue. This is particularly true when testing massive structures (e.g. satellites), because due to physical design and manufacturing limits, the dynamics of the testing facility often couples with that of the test specimen in the frequency range of interest. Therefore it is of paramount importance to improve environmental testing performances by considering the dynamic coupling between the test specimen and the instrumentation hardware and take suitable countermeasures before running the actual program. In this context, a “Virtual Shaker Approach” is developed to run a multidisciplinary simulation which closely represents the real vibration test. For these reasons, models accurately replicating the behavior of the different hardware involved in the environmental test need to be developed and validated. Starting from these models, the Virtual Shaker approach can then be used to optimize test execution, improving controller performance and develop new methods to exploit the available experimental data.