Accelerated vibration testing

14 March 2011

Accelerating traditional vibration test times can be a key to achieving faster produce design cycles. Brüel & Kjær and HBM-nCode offer products that can reduce vibration test times without exposing the product to unrealistic vibration levels.

Traditional Gaussian random test signals cannot accurately represent the ‘peaky’ vibration signals seen in the real-life use of many products. To address this, the LDS LASERUSB Vibration Controller from Brüel & Kjær offers non-Gaussian random vibration through its Kurtosis Control software.

The ability to tailor kurtosis allows for accelerated fatigue testing, as testing with high kurtosis delivers more time at high acceleration levels. For a durability test lasting many hours, high-kurtosis testing is said to deliver more fatigue damage than a Gaussian random test.

So, how do you accurately simulate the conditions that brought about your measured field data? nCode GlyphWorks software from HBM is said to be the only commercial software that makes it possible to quantify the fatigue of vibration testing and subsequently create a representative PSD or swept-sine shaker vibration test. nCode GlyphWorks enables the combination of multiple time or frequency domain data sets into representative test spectra that accelerate the test while matching the fatigue damage seen in the field data.
Accelerated test spectra, exported from nCode GlyphWorks can be easily imported into Brüel & Kjær controllers to perform shaker table tests.