Author(s)

R. D. Hampton, T. H. Li & L. K. Byers

Abstract

Actual military transports (such as ground vehicles or ships) are often not acceptable for shock-response testing, for such reasons as cost, vehicle availability, personnel availability, or time. If testing can be conducted on scaled-down models, whether of the actual transports or of critical subsections, the results might be usable to approximate the shock response of the full-scale hardware, provided that appropriate scaling relationships can be developed. Since many military vehicles and vessels have large structural portions consisting of homogeneous flat plates, these elements serve as a logical starting point for shock-response scaling efforts. This paper develops scaling relationships for thin rectangular plates in simple support, subject to transverse point-shock loads, under the assumptions of linearity, homogeneity, and geometric similarity of the plate faces. The plates are also assumed to have the same respective modal damping ratios, for corresponding modes. It is found that simple scaling factors exist, between corresponding modal frequencies, and between corresponding damped modeshapes. Further, via suitable discretization, these factors can be used to provide simple scaling relationships between the shock response of points on a scaled-down plate and that of corresponding (scaled) points on the scaled-up plate. Keywords: shock response, rectangular plates, modal analysis, model scaling.

Keywords

shock response, rectangular plates, modal analysis, model scaling