The measurement of structural mobilities of a circular cylindrical shell

Structural mobility is useful for the estimation of structural power flows in coupled systems. Although the methods of measuring structural mobilities are easily found for one-dimensional beam structures, few are available for cylindrical shells. In this paper, a new method is proposed for the measurement of the structural mobilities of a circular cylindrical shell. A point force excitation is used instead of circumferential modal forces which are difficult to implement in practice. This method utilizes the least squares technique to obtain the transfer function components of different circumferential modes from the measured data. Experiments were carried out on a circular cylindrical shell with different end conditions excited by a point force to verify the feasibility of this proposed method. (C) 2000 Acoustical Society of America. [S0001-4966(00)00603-2].