Ruggedizing Printed Circuit Boards Using a Wideband Dynamic Absorber

Abstract

The existing approaches to ruggedizing inherently fragile and sensitive critical components of electronic equipment such as printed circuit boards (PCB) for use in hostile industrial and military environment are either insufficient or expensive. This paper addresses a novel approach towards ruggedizing commercial-off-the-shelf PCBs using a miniature wideband dynamic absorber. The optimisation technique used relies on the experimentally measured vibration spectra and complex receptance of the original PCB.The analytical study and full-scale experiment show that an optimised wideband dynamic absorber with the mass of only 15% relative to the total mass of the PCB is quite capable of the essential suppression of all relevant resonant responses of the PCB under shock, wideband random and sinusoidal vibration with variable frequency.