Momentum - The Magazine for Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering Vol. 3 No. 4 Winter 2018 | Page 19

The day of the shaker table ribbon cutting ceremony, mechanical engineering professor Pablo Tarazaga and postgraduate researcher Sriram Malladi show
visitors from the Naval Surface Warfare Center at Dahlgren the Advanced Vibrations and Acoustics Lab on the first floor of Durham Hall.
out in the fleet, and this was a shaker we had that we really weren’t using,” Martin said. “So we
thought under our educational partnering agreement with Virginia Tech that we can essentially
loan it down to Virginia Tech indefinitely, and they can get really good use out of it.”
Luke Martin, shock and vibration technical expert at NSWC Dahlgren and alumnus (M.S. in
mechanical engineering ’04, Ph.D. in mechanical engineering ’11), cuts the ribbon at the lab's
ceremony debuting the new, fully operational shaker table.
Not only does the equipment expand the lab’s research capabilities, the partnership signals
progress in a plan to ultimately create a vibrations and adaptive structures consortium among
Virginia Tech, other universities, government, and industry — a consortium Tarazaga and
other College of Engineering faculty hope to base out of the Blacksburg campus.
If it pans out, Malladi explained, it will position Virginia Tech to play a central role in an
ongoing movement to develop international standards of environmental testing. Currently,
objects are certified by demonstrating how much vibrational force they can take until they
break. But the hope is to develop a certification framework that can assist in the design stage
when creating objects and to better understand the forces acting upon objects in transport and
field operation.
MOMENTUM
FALL 2018
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