Vibration analysis - final report

 

Your audience is other students with a similar background to your own but who have not done this experiment. Think of what information you need to convey to them to describe in detail what you did and what you found. After reading this, they should be able to duplicate your work.

1. Summary. Give a short introduction to the lab. The introduction should be for a student totally unfamiliar with this lab to help them understand the basics of what you have done.
2. Methods. Here you may assume that the audience has the lab instructions that you used. So you should describe in particular how you did this with your particular plate. Be sure to describe any difficulties you encountered, solutions you found, better or different methods than the instructions.
3. Plate. Make a clear drawing with detailed dimensions and other information in sufficiently complete detail that someone reading just this report could create a duplicate plate. Include directions for making the modification.
4. Predictions. List your predictions of the effects on the various modes including your reasoning as much as possible. This may be done using a table of some sort.
5. Table of Results. Create a large table of the results. You may do this in various ways but be sure to set this up in a way that shows which modes correspond with each other. In the best cases you will have eight related results: the original calculated frequency, the original calculated mode shape, the original measured frequency, the original measured mode shape, the modified calculated frequency, the modified calculated mode shape, the modified measured frequency, the modified measured mode shape. You may need to be creative in your layout and it may require multiple pages to make this work but try to make the comparisons easy. Where you have results with no correspondence, you may need to leave gaps in the table.
6. Discussion and Conclusions. Discuss the results, drawing attention to where the calculations and measured results agree or disagree. Discuss your predictions and how well they match the actual results. Also discuss the gaps (where you couldn't make a match) in your table. Based on your actual results, identify one mode that you could tune effectively using your modification. In other words, by making possibly very small cuts, what one mode would be easily adjusted in frequency using the cut location you explored?
7. Suggest improvements for this lab.
8. Describe briefly the roles each of you played in carrying out this lab.