Momentum - The Magazine for Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering Vol. 3 No. 4 Winter 2018

STORY & PHOTO BY ERICA CORDER COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING Shaking Shaking up a lab Alumni helping make lab a world-leading facility for vibrations research When you buy a mobile phone, you might not think about how far it’s traveled to get to your pocket. You might think even less about the vibrational forces that acted upon it during its journey to you. But in the Advanced Vibrations and Acoustics Lab (AVAL), founded and directed by mechanical engineering John R. Jones III Faculty Fellow and associate professor Pablo Tarazaga, researchers are poised to make important inroads into determining standards of just how much vibration an object can take, including objects like your phone. Sriram Malladi continues to work in the lab as a postdoctoral researcher since earning his master’s degree and Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Virginia Tech. He says he was drawn to researching vibrations because it’s one of the most ubiquitous forces in our daily lives — which means most of us forget about it. But not in the lab where certifying the structural integrity of objects from cell phones to car parts to military equipment takes prominence. And with the help of alumni who work at the U.S. Naval Surface Warfare Center at Dahlgren, Virginia, the lab was loaned new equipment that enables further research capabilities. In December 2017, Tarazaga and Malladi watched as a crew unloaded a 2,000-pound, navy blue shaker table and its components into AVAL’s first floor space in Durham Hall. The shaker table, which can apply a vibrational force of up to 2,000 kilograms, can shake objects at frequen- cies as high as 4,000 hertz — meaning the researchers can recreate a wide array of environmen- tal conditions in the lab like those seen in the field. The loan was orchestrated by alumni who work at NSWC Dahlgren, including shock and vibration technical expert Luke Martin (M.S. in mechanical engineering ’04, Ph.D. in mechani- cal engineering ’11), who was a classmate of Tarazaga's. “We use shakers as a tool in our field to basically qualify equipment in weapon systems to go MOMENTUM FALL 2018 PAGE 18

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