Abaqus provides the students at Los Alamos Dynamic Summer School experience using Advanced FEA methods to solve real-world problems.

Charles Ferrar, Director, Dynamics Summer School Los Alamos National Laboratory

The Los Alamos Dynamic Summer School is a very selective 9-week summer school in which top upper-level, US-citizen, undergraduate students from universities around the nation attend lectures and work in teams of three with a Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) mentor on research projects related to the structural health monitoring, damage prognosis and model validation and uncertainty quantification. Their objective is to produce a conference publication summarizing their results by the end of the summer. The goal of this program is threefold: 1) to encourage these students to attend graduate school and specialize in fields related to LANL’s mission, 2) to recruit the top students to return to LANL in following summers as graduate research assistants (GRAs), and 3) to subsequently hire the best of these students as LANL staff upon completion of their graduate degrees. Over the last seven years, 111 students from 34 academic institutions have participated in the summer school. This year 21 students participated in the program. The program has developed a curriculum that involves all students performing an experimental modal analysis on a test structure and then subsequently using ABAQUS to perform a finite element modal analysis using a variety of different elements and/or mesh densities. The experimental and numerical data generated by the students then form the basis for a series of lectures on model validation and uncertainty quantification.

One project that has been undertaken by the students was the study of Vibration Modeling and Suppression in Tennis Racquets. Students set up physical tests and FEA models to explore how add-on vibrational dampers affect the sweet spot of a tennis racquet. The model was simplified for Finite Element Analysis with the use of beam elements. String intersections were modeled with shared nodes. The handle was modeled using solid elements. A negative temperature was applied to the strings to simulate tension. For the racquet considered in this study commercial vibration dampers have a negative impact on handle transmissibility. The numerical model demonstrates that mode-shapes are unaffected by increased string tension though their frequencies are increased substantially.

"Using Abaqus for their projects has significantly enhanced the students’ learning experience." Charles Ferrar