Application of Vibration Control by Confinement to Submarine Subsytems

Unpredicted fastener failure could result in reduction (or loss) of performance and unexpected destruction of vehicles. In particular, this problem is more severe in structures subjected to high speeds such as fighter aircraft. The goal of this SBIR project is to combine the recent developments in the fields of vibrations and modeling in order to increase service-free life and the quality of performance and reliability of the fasteners, and to reduce unnecessary maintenance and failures in aircraft structures. In this Phase I project, the feasibility of developing an efficient and effective mathematical model which is capable of incorporating the dynamic characteristics of fasteners, their interfaces with the host structure, and the host structure itself will be investigated. Such combination will result in a significant gain in computational speed and improvement in accurancy of the numerical results which produce a better prediction. The model will be adaptive based on the closed-loop dynamic relation between fasteners and the host structure. The main innovations of our approach is the inclusion of the effect of fasteners on vibration phenomenons such as loci veering and mode localization and the application of the receptance method to the fasteners dynamics which makes the model compatible with the existing computer models.