Aerodynamics of a Spinning Cylinder in Rarefied Gas Flows

Conclusions The present study has investigated the problem of the elastic response of a generic space vehicle with degraded joints. The steppedbeam formulation based on elementary beam theory is employed for extracting modal parameters of a normalized generic space vehicle. Next, the modal superposition principle is used with a low damping value for obtaining the elastic response of the vehicle to impulse excitation. The results for elastic displacement peaks are obtained for normalized rotational joint  exibilities of different magnitudes acting at different spanwise locations. The results show that locations of the joint with  exibility play an important role in determining the magnitude and location of the peak response. Further, it is found that Ž rst mode frequency results for various values and locations of joint  exibilities can possibly be uniŽ ed into a single linear expression, based on the normalized stiffness distribution of the space vehicle. Finally, it is found that tip excitation is more critical than root excitation.