Complex mechanical structures are composed of an assembly of several components, often exhibiting different mechanical properties and joined at their interfaces by different junction types. The various dynamic behaviours of these substructures and the applied external loadings generate important efforts on the main structure, resulting in high acceleration responses of the on-board equipments, affecting their performance, reliability and security. It is therefore necessary to protect them from these harsh conditions by isolating them from the rest of the structure.These researches are related to structural vibration control and aim at proposing a new method to dynamically characterize interfaces between different substructures. This method is then integrated to a robust design approach to minimize the power transmitted between a source and a receiver substructure. A power flow mode method has been developed, which allows determining eigenvalues and eigenvectors respectively representing qualitative and quantitative information on the power flowing inside the structure. This has been further applied to study the power transmitted at the interface, making it possible to identify the direction associated to the dominant power flow pattern and to quantify their contribution.These results have been applied to propose a robust design approach of structural interfaces. Optimization procedures have been implemented and compared to minimize the power transmitted between with respect to the interface stiffness parameters. The importance of considering the robustness of these solutions has been underlined by performing a complementary analysis based on a non-probabilistic approach.
Dynamic characterization and robust design of structural interfaces