The vibration of a beam with a local unilateral elastic contact

The mass reduction of satellite solar arrays results in significant panel flexibility. When such structures are launched in a packed configuration there is a possible striking one with another dynamically, leading ultimately to structural damage during the launch stage. To prevent this, rubber snubbers are mounted at well chosen points of the structure and they act as a one sided linear spring. A negative consequence is that the dynamics of these panels becomes nonlinear. In this paper a solar array and a snubber are simply modelled as a linear Euler-Bernoulli beam with a one sided linear spring respectively. A numerical and an experimental study of a beam striking a one-sided spring under harmonic excitation is presented. A finite element model representation is used to solve the partial differential equations governing the structural dynamics. The models are subsequently validated and updated with experiments.