The acoustic guitar as an experimental platform to teach vibration measurements, modal parameter estimation, and data management

Abstract

The laboratory class required by Penn State’s Graduate Program in Acoustics teaches general experimental methods for acoustics. Students learn the basics of data acquisition, sensor calibration and excitation methods through lectures and performing experiments. This talk will discuss the lab experiment used to teach vibration measurements, basic modal parameter estimation and data management using an acoustic guitar as the experimental testbed. Students are required to develop their own test plan for accelerometer and impact hammer locations and then collect the data using a custom-written LabVIEW data acquisition program. Since the data acquisition involves multiple impact and response locations, the students are required to manage their data in a way that allows for easy mapping of data files to spatial locations. They then estimate the guitar body mode shapes by decomposing the measured mobility matrix into its singular values and right- and left-singular matrices. Finally, the students visualize their...