Shock and Vibration Fixture

This shock and vibration fixture was designed for the Building Research Etablishement, Fire Detection testing body. It is used to test smoke and heat detectors, as well as isolators that require high acceleration testing, up to 1000g! To allow this, a lightweight fixture has to be used. The previous system weighted around 20kg. This fixture with its sacrificial plate weight only 8 kg.
The fixture is also design to do endurance testing (sweep sine up to 150 Hz), so that it does not have any resonance below 300Hz. An additional constraint is the fixture must be maintainable by allowing replacement of its various parts. 

While cast magnesium is generally used, it was decided to use mill aluminum plates to build the main structure. This had the main advantage to reduce drastically the costs compared to a forge then milled fixture. The approximate cost of this bookend is around £1,500. 

In order to ensure the fixture meet the design requirements, I designed and simulated using (NASTRAN) the vibration behaviour, as well as its dynamic response