The participants stand in front of a heap of colourful Lego blocks. Working in teams, they are to build a large cube-shaped block of Lego bricks. The sales partners start out with great zeal. ”Then they were told to program a sinusoidal profile with a frequency of 100 Hz and 3 g acceleration“, Dimitris Karigiannis, European Distributor Sales Manager IMV, says. The tests were made live at the shaker. The game marked the end of the one-day seminar about “Vibration testing“ for the employees of the IMV sales partner Alava Ingenieros. The seminar took place at the Portuguese Instituto Electrotécnico Português in Porto.

Basic theory

In the first part of the seminar, Dimitris Karigiannis presented application areas of vibration tests, spoke about the basics of vibration and explained terms such as sine, noise, shock or resonance analysis. In the second part of the seminar, several possible tests at the shaker were illustrated to the participants. At the end of the day, the new knowledge was reinforced by the above game with an IMV shaker m60 and IMV vibration controller and LEGO blocks.

Higher deflection at low frequency

The winner was the team that managed to build the Lego cube in such a way that it did not crumble at lowest frequency. With this game, Karigiannis demonstrated that deflection is small at high frequency and the structures are stable. When the frequency gets lower, the deflection becomes higher in the test. When structures are excited at resonance level, the stress increases dramatically that they break down in the end. The winner was Arián Alonso. Congratulations!

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