Classification of violent environments that cause equipment failure

A series of tests was conducted to evaluate transient motion analysis methods in order to determine which is the best indicator of the capacity of the motion to cause failure of facilities' equipment. Previous work 1,2 has proven that the pseudovelocity shock spectrum should be used to evaluate violent motion severity. This experimental research provides additional evidence. Six blowers were exposed to six different violent loadings, each could be progressively increased until the blower failed. Five blowers did indeed fail. The time histories were recorded and analyzed by four methods - Fourier transform magnitude, pseudovelocity and acceleration shock spectra and peak g levels. The analysis that does the best job is the damped shock spectrum plotted with pseudovelocity as the ordinate on four coordinate paper. It shows the five failure causing environments to be similar and the sixth environment weaker. This article describes the tests, illustrates different ways in which the blowers failed and discusses the data analyses.