Gentlefolk,
If you have the time and money, you build a hanger queen and vibrate that a
couple of times worse than you think the flight article will see. Then, if
anything comes loose, you redesign it, or its assembly procedures,
inspections or all of those so it won't come loose on the flight article.
You do not vibrate the flight article--vibration effects tend to be
cumulative.
This sort of testing is the difference between, say, 90% reliability, and
99.99%. It's expensive--the more so if you create a software model to
analyze the acoustic and infrasonic vibrational modes. But if you can't
afford to lose a bird, (a DSCS III cost about 1.3 gigabucks in today's money)
you do it. This is a judgment call, but where XCorp and especially ERPS
are now, I think one accepts a higher level of risk to be able to do anything
at all.
However, if you do have some sacrificial hardware, and can think of a
cheap way of shaking it to see what comes lose, and have the hours to spare,
I think it would be in the direction of goodness to shake it. If you're
already flying something, high resolution accelerometer data from flights can
stand in for computer model predictions--the goal is for the test regime to
exceed the envelope of the flight regime.
--Best, Gerald
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