Ground vibration studies of aerospace structures- NAL's contribution

Ground-resonance testing is an important phase in an aerospace development programme before the flight vehicle is cleared for the actual fright trails. The emerging trends in civil and military aircraft and their requirements from sbuctural-dynamic stand-point have been the basis for the development of various test systems at NAL. Use of new techniques, novel concepts and an integrated systemic approach were the key in these developments. The Prst task was the development of a six-channel multipoint test system MAMPA. Application of MMPA to typical rocket wing and other such aerospace structures brought out the importance of signal control, speed of data acquisition, etc. These, together with the all round progress in digital techniques culminated in the development of CAVITAS (computer-aided vibration test and analysis system). The frequency domain analysis adopted provides distinct advantages in the estimation of structural dynamic characteristics. Concurrently, modal analysis using Laplace domain approach was implemented into the mobile version of CA YITAS