Representative Mechanical Shock Testing for Satellite Electronic Units
Abstract
Various mechanical test benches (ringing plates, Hopkinson bars) have been developed in order to meet shock specifications but all of them do not achieve the same level of stress in the equipment. On a stiff ringing plate excited by a dropping mass in particular, it has been demonstrated that the unit responses (accelerations, stresses, I/F forces) associated to the out of plane excitation largely exceed the responses induced by a pyrotechnic shock on a satellite sandwich panel, considering the same average base acceleration (SRS) for both shocks.For a unit mass up to 10 kg, it appears that a thin aluminum ringing plate whose bending stiffness is the same as the sandwich panel provides a realistic dynamic behavior to the equipment. The attenuation of the unit responses w.r.t. the rigid plate varies from 6 to 12 dB over a large frequency spectrum.It has been demonstrated that the thin ringing plate can be tuned to the specification without additional difficulties using a mass dummy of the unit. When the specification is applied, large margins remain on unit responses w.r.t. the true environment. These remaining margins are associated to the specification process.To conclude, this investigation demonstrates that some physical information on the environment of the unit on the satellite could be used along with the shock specification in order to get more realistic unit dynamic behavior during shock qualification.
- Publication:
-
13th European Conference on Spacecraft Structures, Materials & Environmental Testing
- Pub Date:
- June 2014
- Bibcode:
- 2014ESASP.727E..94B