Numerical and experimental activities with the seanet three plates assembly

In this paper, several activities concerning the SEANET test case will be presented and discussed. The test-article is three flexural plates' aluminium assembly. This test article has been identified for analysing the problem related to the simulation of junctions. In the present case, the plates are connected using simple welded beams. The results will concern three different phases of the research activity: (i) the experimental measurements with specific reference to the use of the piezoelectric actuators; (ii) the numerical predictions by using a full finite element model and a scaled one in order to reduce the computational effort; (iii) the predictions obtained by using commercial SEA tools (SEADS© and ESEA©, both produced by LMS). For each phase, the key steps will be highlighted together with the difficulties associated with the specific numerical and/or experimental analyses. Particular attention will be devoted to the analysis of the promising results obtained with the scaled finite element model. In fact, the preliminary experiences with such a technique were performed on simplified test-articles, without experimental comparisons. In this case, there was the opportunity of performing interesting analysis with both experimental measurements and numerical predictions coming from different methodologies. The paper will address also the analysis of the several strategies for simulating the junctions in FEM techniques. Models of increasing complexity have been assembled and the associated results are deeply discussed.