Developing Conservative Mechanical Shock Specifications

Mechanical shock testing and analysis are integral parts of developing new high-value items and ensuring their capability to withstand the environments to which they will be exposed. Most conventional methods for specifying mechanical shock environments provide no mathematically defensible correlation between their parameters and the damage-causing potential of the environment, thus warranting the study of new methods to specify shock environments. In this paper, a variety of parameters that correlate to the damage-causing potential of a shock environment are identified. The parameters investigated are restricted to those that can be constrained during a real-time laboratory test. An analytical study using a sensitivity analysis determined the effect of each parameter on the damage-causing potential of a shock environment. These parameters are used to create shock specifications and investigate the simulated response of a structure. The parameters generated in this study improve mechanical shock testing by providing a strong correlation between the shock environment and the damage-causing potential of a mechanical shock.