DETERMINATION AND LIMITATIONS OF BLOCKED FORCES IN INDUSTRIAL SETTINGS

Transfer path analysis methods have been used for decades to determine noise and vibration paths emanating from machinery. In its advent, the machinery source had to be disconnected from the receiver it was attached to in order to gain useful information about each. Further advances in methodology allowed for determining machinery input forces without decoupling them from the structures they were attached to. However, these methods were limited in that the machinery and structures were required to be treated as a system. Thus, any force data obtain was only useful in the configuration it was measured in. Finally, a method to measure the blocked forces of a source was developed that allowed the forces to be calculated in-situ and transferred to a different receiver if desired. Ultimately, both cost and time savings were realized. However, the method required matrix inversion, thus introducing additional possibilities for error in the final data. This thesis starts with developing a statistical energy analysis model that will be validated using experimentally obtained blocked forces. It moves on to exam two case studies of increasing complexity while discussing a few possible areas where error could be introduced and how to effectively mitigate them.