Finite Element Model Updating of a Thin Wall Enclosure under Impact Excitation

Simulation result of a structural dynamics problem is dependent on the techniques used in the finite element model and the major task in model updating is determination of the changes to be made to the numerical model so that dynamic properties are comparable to the experimental result. In this paper, the dynamic analysis of a thin wall structure (approx. 1.5 +/- 0.1 mm thick) was realized using the Lanczos tool to extract the modes between 0 and 200 Hz, but the interest was to achieve a good aggreement between the first ten natural frequencies. A shell element with mid size nodes was used to improve the finite element result and the model was tunned using the damping constant, material properties and discretization. The correlation of the results from the impact excitation response test and the finite element was significantly improved. A correlation coefficient of 0.99 was achieved after tunning the model.