Summary: | Thin steel sheets are widely used in manufacturing engineering products such as automotive structures and domestic appliances. The dynamic characteristics of the products are of paramount importance to be used in the procedure of updating finite element models. However, they are relatively difficult to measure and a special approach is required to perform the measurement. In this paper, the use of the special approach in the measurement of the dynamic characteristics of a welded structure made from thin steel sheets is presented and discussed. The chief aim of this paper is to improve the quality of the measurement of the dynamic characteristics of the welded structure. The natural frequencies and mode shapes are the dynamical behaviour of interest in this study. They are then used in the procedure of updating the initial FE model of the welded structure. NASTRAN SOL 200 is used to improve the correlation between the FE and measured results. The updating parameters such as the properties of spot welds and the stiffness of the soft springs which are used to represent the free boundary conditions are used in the updating procedure. The natural frequencies and mode shapes obtained from the updated FE model are validated with the measured counterparts.
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