Combining Virtual Simulation with Hands-on Experiments for Teaching Mechanical Vibrations

Mechanical vibration is one of the important courses offered in the systems and dynamics area. Traditionally this course is taught theoretically with little emphasis on experimental verification. Since non-intuitive concepts are explained involving complex mathematical manner, students usually find this to be a one of the difficult course in the curriculum. To address these issues, we have developed an integrated approach which combines virtual simulation of each concept with the laboratory experimentation. The course material is built and structured around a standard vibration course material to make it easy to implement in a traditional curriculum while enhancing the learning experience of the students. This combines the theory with hands-on, easy-to-set experiments and interesting simulations. The material is structured similar to a typical vibration text book. Students can perform a number of experiments, which include; simple single degree of freedom systems, multi-degree of freedom systems and continuous beams with different boundary conditions. Both free and forced vibration experiments can be performed in torsional and translational configurations, with and without damping. We also provide an appealing virtual environment for each experiment so that students can graphically see and sense the effects of changing the system parameters. An example is seeing the effect of damping on vibration amplitude in different frequency regions such as stiffness controlled, mass controlled, and around resonances. The complete package includes a full set of cost-effective data acquisition system, wireless sensors and comprehensive user-friendly software.