Experimental Characterisation and FEA Comparison between Wave and Helical Springs

Abstract

Vibrations are unwanted mechanical phenomena which cause performance deterioration of dedicated equipment and critical electronic hardware. In order to reduce this vibration during the transportation of the dedicated payloads, that is, optical payload or microwave payload and critical electronic hardware such as atomic clocks, detectors and containers with vibration isolation devices are used. Traditional vibration or shock absorbing systems are big in size which makes the whole container huge and bulky. In our present paper, we try to characterise different types of springs (helical and wave) and develop a FEM methodology to calculate the stress and displacement of the springs under load. Generally, helical springs are used with shock absorber systems having large displacement area. Instead of helical springs, we have proposed wave springs. In this study we have selected helical and wave springs for our experiments and compared them for the fulfilment of our objective. The future aim of this study is to select a suitable spring which can be used with a small size damper in order to make a compact vibration isolation system which will provide the same load carrying capacity in a constrained space as that of a traditional system. The CAD files of both the springs are modelled using Autodesk Inventor Professional 2019 and Creo Parametric 5.0, while FEM methodology is performed using HyperWorks 2019 for both the springs. The theoretical calculations of the models are compared with the FEA results and then validated experimentally.