ACT Extension for Harmonic and

Transient Base Excitation in

ANSYS Mechanical_V3.0 15.0 Release

Mohamed Senousy, Ph.D., P.Eng.

mohamed.senousy@ansys.com
Jan. 2014

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 Base Excitation
Shaker tables are commonly used in the world of vibration testing. The shaker
drives a structure sinusoidally through a range of frequencies at known
amplitude and phase. Harmonic acceleration can be applied in ANSYS
Mechanical by exciting the whole structure. However, the base of the structure
is fixed and the measured outputs (displacement, velocity and acceleration) are
all relative to the base and does not account for the phase difference. Results in
this case wont match the measured quantities on the structure.
The old way of overcoming the results mismatch is to use the Large Mass Method
(LMM) in which we attempt to simulate a base excitation by adding a large
mass to the degrees of freedom which make up the base of the structure and
applying a force equal to M^2x, (M is the actual mass, is the frequency of
the harmonic load, and x is the amplitude of base excitation). Implementing
the LMM in ANSYS Mechanical requires adding some APDL commands.
The Enforced Motion Method EMM has been currently developed to account for
acceleration or displacement base excitation in Mode-Superposition Transient
and Harmonic Analyses. Since this technique is only available in MAPDL, an
ACT extension has been created for base excitation in Harmonic and transient
analyses.
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 Example
A sizing deck is shacked using a constant harmonic base
acceleration of 10 g in the z direction.

Fixed Support
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 Enforced Motion Method
Step#1 : Setup Modal Analysis
1. Define a named selection for all support bases in the
model.
2. Create Base:
a. Select a base named selection.
b. Define excitation direction
c. Give the base a unique integer ID number

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 Enforced Motion Method
1. Acceleration or displacement base excitation can be
added.
2. In Harmonic analysis, loading can be either constant or
frequency dependent.
3. In Transient analysis, time dependent excitation can be
directly input in a tabular form, or read from a file.

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 Enforced Motion Method
Reading data from a file
1. The file must be in tab-delimited, blank-delimited, or
comma-delimited format,
2. File/Path name should NOT contain any special
characters,
3. *.txt
4. Number of sample point has to be entered

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 Enforced Motion Method
3. When a tabular displacement/acceleration is defined, the
values in the table are automatically ascended, and
plotted once the apply button is clicked.
4
2
1

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 Results
Table Deformation

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 Results
Base Deformation

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 Comparison with Direct Acceleration Method (DAM)
0,6
Table Deformation (mm) - EMM
Frequency = 150 Hz Base Deformation (mm) -EMM
Table Deformation (mm) - DAM
0,4

0,2
Amplitude (mm)

0,0
0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000

-0,2

-0,4

-0,6
Angle

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 Comparison with Direct Acceleration
Method (DAM)
4
Table Deformation (mm)-- DAM
3,5
Table Deformation (mm)-- EMM
3
Amplitude (mm)

2,5

2 Relative
1,5

0,5

0
Absolute
120 125 130 135 140 145 150
Frequency (Hz)

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