An approach for the assessment of the statistical aspects of the SEA coupling loss factors and the vibrational energy transmission in complex aircraft structures: Experimental investigation and methods benchmark

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In the application of Statistical Energy Analysis “SEA” to complex assembled structures, a purely predictive model often exhibits errors. These errors are mainly due to a lack of accurate modelling of the power transmission mechanism described through the Coupling Loss Factors (CLF). Experimental SEA (ESEA) is practically used by the automotive and aerospace industry to verify and update the model or to derive the CLFs for use in an SEA predictive model when analytical estimates cannot be made. This work is particularly motivated by the lack of procedures that allow an estimate to be made of the variance and confidence intervals of the statistical quantities when using the ESEA technique.The aim of this paper is to introduce procedures enabling a statistical description of measured power input, vibration energies and the derived SEA parameters. Particular emphasis is placed on the identification of structural CLFs of complex built-up structures comparing different methods. By adopting a Stochastic Energy Model (SEM), the ensemble average in ESEA is also addressed. For this purpose, expressions are obtained to randomly perturb the energy matrix elements and generate individual samples for the Monte Carlo (MC) technique applied to derive the ensemble averaged CLF. From results of ESEA tests conducted on an aircraft fuselage section, the SEM approach provides a better performance of estimated CLFs compared to classical matrix inversion methods. The expected range of CLF values and the synthesized energy are used as quality criteria of the matrix inversion, allowing to assess critical SEA subsystems, which might require a more refined statistical description of the excitation and the response fields. Moreover, the impact of the variance of the normalized vibration energy on uncertainty of the derived CLFs is outlined.