Full-scale Mechanical Vibrations Laboratory (original) (raw)

A unique full-scale experimental laboratory was recently developed to improve students' physical understanding of the complex principles presented in mechanical vibrations courses. Rather than creating the typical small scale model with lumped masses to illustrate important mechanical vibrations concepts, a full-scale structure was used to improve the relevance of the experiments so that students can more readily connect the results with the real world. The Bridge House, a one-story building constructed by undergraduate students, is aptly named since it spans a small seasonal creek in the student outdoor experimental construction laboratory located on the California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly) campus. This structure is ideal for vibration experimentation since it is simple enough for the students to quickly model with hand calculations and computational models, yet complex enough so that the results can be readily applied to an actual structure. Forced vibration testing was employed to excite the building. The goal of the forced vibration testing was to experimentally determine the building's natural frequencies, mode shapes, and damping so that the students could compare their predictions of the dynamic response of the building.