A study on battlefield-born vibrations are having research scientist rethinking military vehicle testing and evaluation methods that could also one day improve automotive and aviation industry standards.
A team of Army and University of Maryland researchers and engineers developed reliability tests to better capture unforeseen failures in ground and air vehicle designs before the military adopts systems and components. The project is being supported by an industry-government consortium which is sponsoring this research at the University of Maryland’s Center for Advanced Life Cycle Engineering (CALCE) and consists of leading electronics manufacturers and users from both military and commercial fields.
The research is being conducted with a TEAM Tensor 900, six degrees of freedom (6-DoF) shaker, one of the only two of its kind in the world. The Tensor 900 is capable of vibrating a product in three translational and three rotational motors simultaneously instead of the current practice of vibrating a product sequentially for every axis.