  The mass reduction of satellite solar arrays results in significant panel
flexibility. When such structures are launched there is a possible striking at
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 one sided linear spring; as a negative
consequence, the dynamic of these panels becomes nonlinear. In this paper a
solar array and a snubber are simply modeled as a linear Euler-Bernoulli beam
with a one sided linear spring respectively. In this investigation, a numerical
and an experimental study of a beam striking a one-sided spring under harmonic
excitation is presented. The finite element approximation is used to solve the
partial differential equations governing the structural dynamics. The models
are subsequently validated and updated with experiments.

Classical Physics