Comparison of mass operator methods considering test uncertainties

In the space industry, structures undergo several vibration and acoustic tests in order to verify their design and give confidence that they will survive the launch and other critical in-orbit dynamic scenarios. At component level, vibration tests are conducted with the aim to reach local or global interface loads without exceeding the design loads. So, it is often necessary to control and limit the input based on a load criterion. This means the test engineer should be able to assess the interface loads, even when load cannot be measured. This paper presents various approaches to evaluate interface loads using measured accelerations and by referring to mass operators. Various methods, from curve fitting techniques to finite element-based methods are presented. The methods are compared using signals with known imperfection to identify strengths and weaknesses of each mass operator definition.