Rotational degree-of-freedom synthesis: An optimised finite difference method for non-exact data

Measuring the rotational dynamic behaviour of a structure is important for many areas of dynamics such as passive vibration control, acoustics, and model updating. Specialist and dedicated equipment is often needed, unless the rotational degree-of-freedom is synthesised based upon translational data. However, this involves numerically differentiating the translational mode shapes to approximate the rotational modes, for example using a finite difference algorithm. A key challenge with this approach is choosing the measurement spacing between the data points, an issue which has often been overlooked in the published literature.

The present contribution will for the first time prove that the use of a finite difference approach can be unstable when using non-exact measured data and a small measurement spacing, for beam-like structures. Then, a generalised analytical error analysis is used to propose an optimised measurement spacing, which balances the numerical error of the finite difference equation with the propagation error from the perturbed data. The approach is demonstrated using both numerical and experimental investigations. It is shown that by obtaining a small number of test measurements it is possible to optimise the measurement accuracy, without any further assumptions on the boundary conditions of the structure.