Abstract
Micro-vibrations on board spacecraft are an issue of growing importance, as some modern payloads, and in particular the new generations of optical instruments require extreme platform stability. These low level mechanical disturbances are usually created by the functioning of mechanical equipment (sources) such as reaction wheels, antenna pointing mechanisms cryo-coolers etc., and cover a wide frequency range. Because of the low level of the vibrations and their wide frequency range, the modeling and analysis of micro-vibrations poses a challenge as the typical structural modeling techniques used in this sector (Finite Element Method (FEM) and Statistical Energy Analysis (SEA)) are reliable only in some areas of the frequency spectrum. The FEM is well suited for low level frequencies; whereas energy methods (e.g. SEA or Energy Finite Element Method EFEA) are suited for high-frequency problems; in the mid-frequency range, finally, other methods (e.g. Hybrid FEA-SEA) tend to be used, even if they’re still not well-established such as the ones named before. However the issue is that there is no single method that can address micro-vibrations in the whole frequency range. In this paper, the methods cited above will be very briefly reviewed and their use in specific micro-vibration prediction problems will be investigated in detail and compared with experimental results. In practice the work presented here uses the Finite Element Method as base-line method to investigate the whole frequency range (say up to 1000 Hz). The FEM predictions are then compared with the experimental results, showing that at medium and high frequencies the response start to deviate significantly from the FEA predictions. The high frequency behavior of the structure will be analyzed using SEA. The mid-frequency range, finally, will be tackled from both directions: from the high frequency side using the Hybrid FE-SEA, whereas from the low frequency side the capability of the standard FEM will be extended using stochastic FEM. The tests are carried out using the structural qualification model of an SSTL satellite bus that has been used to support a high resolution camera. The computational transfer functions and those from the experimental activity will be finally compared using the Modal Assurance Criteria (MAC).