NASA JPL Internship Project
During my internship at NASA JPL, I evaluated chainmail solids, a novel damping material developed by a CalTech research lab, as an advanced material for shock mitigation and vibration damping in aerospace applications. The work combined engineering testing, data analysis, and dynamics simulation and modeling to understand the chainmail’s behavior.
Highlights
- Experimental Design
- Built a custom vibrational testing setup using an electric shaker and 8 accelerometers
- Conducted random vibration tests from 20Hz to 2000Hz
- Chainmail achieved up to 98% reduction in vibration transmissibility at critical frequencies
- Signal Processing & Analysis
- Developed MATLAB tools to compute magnitude, phase, coherence, power spectral density, and mode shapes
- Visualized and interpreted modal behaviors across axes
- Validated experimental results with Finite Element Method (FEM) simulations
- Material Evaluation
- Compared chainmail to solid aluminum and other damping materials
- Demonstrated strong performance in energy attenuation under dynamic excitation
- Investigated chainmail’s tunability and rotational/translational modal behavior
- Applications
- Findings suggest chainmail structures are highly promising for aerospace vibration control
- Further opportunities exist in multi-axis damping and adaptive structural design