AN APPROACH TO OPTIMAL PICK-UP AND EXCITER PLACEMENT

This paper introduces an automated approach to pick-up and exciter placement for modal testing purposes and its application to a car body component. It is a two step procedure which in the first step localizes a subset of structural degrees of freedom of an analytical model as measurement points such that the linear independence of the mode shapes to be measured is maximized. In the second step a given number of exciter locations are chosen among the selected measurement points which allow an excitation of the mode shapes. The approach is based on the QR-decomposition of the modal matrix and the QR- decomposition of the product of the mass matrix with the modal matrix.