Oscar Castro Alvarez, John A. Coote
DOI Number: N/A
Conference number: IFASD-2017-032
This paper reviews several possibilities for improving the standard use of experimental data to model damping by the aircraft industry. Starting from the simplistic proportional damping assumption, more sophisticated models and methods are suggested to extract damping data from ground vibration tests (GVT) and update the damping model. At aircraft level, experimental data is processed to identify off-diagonal elements of the modal damping matrix. The potential benefits of this approach are put to test with two dynamic analyses. At component level, a dedicated ground vibration test was conducted on an aircraft elevator to explore different techniques of damping modelling, using experimental data to extract information and benchmark numerical results. The merits and difficulties of different methodologies are discussed, opening up possibilities for further investigation.