Objectives

The structural damping optimisation and mastering play a fundamental role in the aerospace launchers design and specifications. In this case, the lack or even the absence of structural full size tests in the design and assembly stage leads often to overestimation of damping value. To improve the dynamic comfort of payloads, damping treatments are employed at the final stage of the launcher assemble. That increase the design cost through added unwanted mass. EADS-ASTRIUM is seeking for an efficient way to handle the damping issues in launchers design at early stage of the developments.

This project is devoted to the damping prediction for the next generation of launchers ARIANE6. The project deals specifically with damping management of bolted links between composite structures. In such interfaces, friction between the different sub-elements induces a large amount of dissipated energy. Le project main originality is to propose a virtual damping prediction method and a virtual testing strategy associated to the vibroacoustic behavior of payloads in the low and mid-frequency range. This integrated virtual damping design strategy is supposed to be real testing free.

The robustness aspect of the virtual damping prediction will be also considered in this project. Precisely, the lack of knowledge associated to the virtual testing inputs will be taken into account in order to provide the margins associated to the design and to uncertainties.

Computation cost and time is a real challenge in virtual prototyping, specifically when uncertainties are to be considered. Reduction of time consumption will be a big issue the project will deal with. This will allow the virtual damping design and optimisation realists at the early stage of the vehicles design through specific model reduction and metamodeling strategies suited