A procedure for generating shock design values

Engineers have experienced difficulty when attempting to use enveloping or high fiducial limit statistical techniques for defining the shock environment by shock spectra. A procedure is described for generating shock design values for a simple class of structure subject to transient motion excitation. The shock design values for each mode are those that approximate as a single number each of the Duhamel integrals present in the normal mode equations that are used for performing stress and deflection calculations. The method illustrated here for generating these spectra avoids the common combinatorial techniques that lead to unrealistic design values, and yet provides design values that are still conservative.