Abstract
Power- and signal- cable attachments have a significant impact on the vibrations of space structures. Recent works show the importance of having an analytical model to gain physical insight into the influence of cabling on the dynamics of host structures. The models in the literature focus mainly on pure bending vibrations and ignore the effect of coupling between different coordinates. Recently, the authors demonstrated the importance of modeling the coupling effects in cable-harnessed (CH) beams with straight and periodic wrapping patterns. In real-life situations, the cable attachment patterns are mostly non-periodic, and the cables are also attached to host structures that consist of a combination of several harness elements of same (homogenous) or different (non-homogenous) material properties. Hence, the fully coupled vibration model developed in this article is the first to analyze the vibrations of homogenous and non-homogenous CH beams with non-periodic wrapping patterns. The Frequency Response Functions (FRFs) of the developed model are compared with experiment FRFs in the case of the homogenous non-periodic wrapping pattern. The study shows that the coupling effects are pronounced in non-periodic wrapped CH beams, and the advantage of developing the coupled model over the decoupled model is shown through experimental validation.