Estimation of Spring Stiffness under Conditions of Uncertainty. Interval Approach

The work deals with a problem of estimation of spring stiffness under conditions of uncertainty of its loading and compression measurements. During spring exploitation, the main its parameters stiffness and initial length change since of the metal strain aging. At the spring checking, values of its compression are measured in the necessary range of loading. It is used to describe the spring compression by the Hooke’s law. In practice, a sample of measurements is very short and measuring is implemented with errors, which probability data are unknown. So, it is difficult to validate application of standard statistical methods to estimation of the spring stiffness. Under such conditions, an alternative to now existing approaches is application of the Interval Analysis methods that do not use any probabilistic properties of the measuring errors. In the work, the Interval Analysis methods are used for constructing the information set of admissible values of the spring parameters (the stiffness and initial length).