Advanced systems and services for ground vibration testing - Application for a research test on an Airbus A340-600 aircraft

Kurzfassung

Aerospace manufacturers are faced with the challenge of designing systems and components that have to be safer, more reliable, affordable, offer improved passenger comfort and have less environmental impact than their competitors. In addition, they have to systematically reduce development times in order to get new products to market earlier. In the usual case, only a few prototypes are available for testing and experimental verification, in most cases, only towards the end of the development cycle. To shorten development times while still assuring design critical issues like structural integrity and safety, aircraft development teams are faced with several Ground Vibration Testing (GVT) challenges: (i) ensure identification of all critical modes and assess their non-linear behavior; (ii) manage challenging logistical requirements linked to boundary conditions, structure configurations, the typical usage of high number of sensors with multiple shakers and multi-shift testing teams; (iii) reduce test campaign duration to match development schedule and costs; (iv) deliver accurate, validated and traceable reference data in support of the mathematical model updating and of the flutter certification process. This paper will focus on some recent advances in systems and services that allow testing teams to realize an important testing and analysis time reduction without compromising the accuracy of the results. Emphasis will be put on system performance and openness of the selected industrial GVT platform that allows customization in terms of data acquisition and post-processing. Technical advances include efficient handling of very-high channel count (700) data, new capabilities in Normal Mode Testing, and the possibility to stream userdefined shaker excitation signals for dedicated experimental analysis of structures. The new developments will be illustrated by means of a recently conducted Research Ground Vibration Test on an A340-600 aircraft with ONERA, DLR and Airbus as project partners.