Damage boundaries on shock response spectrum based on an elastic single-degree-of-freedom structural model

Damage boundary based on a single-degree-of-freedom (SDOF) structural model under shock environment is studied in the present paper. Shock environment applied to the SDOF structure is characterized by different shock-waveforms. For an SDOF model with small damping, its shock damage boundary consists of three characteristic lines intersecting at a point, i.e. the isodamage absolute acceleration asymptote, pseudo velocity horizontal line and relative displacement asymptote in different frequency regimes. The upper and lower damage bounds on 4-coordinate pseudo velocity shock response spectrum (PVSRS) graph are proposed, which are associated with generic shock-waveforms with sufficiently large and small shock-waveform coefficients, respectively. The validity of the upper and lower damage bounds proposed in this study is demonstrated using an idealized mass-plate model with pins subjected to shock loads characterized by various shock-waveforms. Particularly, the lower damage bound underpins the use of PVSRS ‘damage metric’ as a rule-of-thumb in various engineering fields. It also shows that the proposed method is suitable for real shock environment.