In Situ Measurements of Interfacial Contact Pressure During Impact Hammer Tests

Understanding the nonlinear dynamical contact interactions within joints is crucial for understanding and predicting the dynamics of assembled structures. In spite of this, most experimental investigations focused on the global vibration behavior, since the local interactions at the interface cannot be observed with standard techniques. In the present work, an advance contact pressure measurement system is used in a unique way to analyze, in situ, the interfacial contact pressures and the contact area inside a bolted lap joint connecting two beams (Brake-Reuss beam). An important feature of the measurement system is that it is designed for frequency ranges including the typical vibration frequency of the Brake-Reuss beam's first eigenmode, and thus permits measurement under dynamic excitation. The dynamics of the contact pressures were investigated with different bolt torque levels and with different excitation levels. The experiments found that significant variations of the contact state occurred and that the contact pressure measurement system could adequately resolve this effect. The influence of the measurement system itself on the global vibration response of the Brake-Reuss beam was shown to be tolerable.