THE NEED FOR CONTROLLED SHOCKS - A NEW TYPE OF SHOCK EXCITER ALLOWS TO APPLY WELL DEFINED MECHANICAL SHOCKS

Holger Nicklich, Martin Brucke, Michael Mende

Abstract

Shock exciters available on the market today suffer from a lack of control of the generated shocks. This paper will present a new type of shock exciter developed by SPEKTRA which is based on the well known Hopkinson-Bar but using a piezoelectric actuator to apply the force pulse input (* patent pending). It will be shown that a piezoelectric actuator driven Hopkinson-Bar generates well defined shocks allowing the control of pulse width and amplitude independently over a wide range. Furthermore the spectrum of the applied shocks can be controlled accurately by shaping the input force pulse coming from the actuator. Thus this new shock exciter is a valuable tool for shock calibration in metrology as well as for sensor characterisation in development departments.

Keywords

shock exciter, Hopkinson-bar, piezoelectric actuator, MEMS testing

Download

IMEKO-WC-2009-TC22-396.pdf

DOI

-

IMEKO TC

TC22 - Vibration Measurement

Back to the proceedings