A LINEAR TRANSFORMATION FOR THE RECONSTRUCTION OF THE RESPONSES BETWEEN SYSTEMS IN SIMILITUDE

The increasing attention towards the possibility of scaling structures and, therefore, systems in similitude in engineering field has led to plenty of methods which allow to reconstruct the response of a system, starting from that of a reference one. In fact, this approach would help to overcome the obstacles associated with full-scale testing, such as cost and setup. However, the associated predictions may not be fully reliable, due to some intrinsic limitations characterizing the traditional similitude methods (based on the definition of similitude conditions and scaling laws), such as: size effects, rate sensitivity phenomena, distorted similitudes. For this reason, a new method, called VOODOO (Versatile Offset Operator for the Discrete Observation of Objects), has been proposed; such a method is based on the definition of a transformation matrix which links the outputs between two sets of points belonging to a linear systems. The applications of VOODOO to plates and systems of plates demonstrate that an exact estimation of the frequency response is obtained when the degrees of freedom involved in the definition of the transformation are considered. Therefore, this work aims at investigating, by means of a sensitivity analysis, the method’s strengths and limitations when other degrees of freedom are considered, in order to identify the direction for further developments.