Block-bar device for energy absorption analysis

The absorbers of energy are more and more studied to develop the passive sa fety of a vehicle. So, it is import:ant to test them with a well-adapted te sting bench. The block-bar seems to be particularly interesting because it allows a long duration of impact. But the investigated results are highly s poiled by some noise. To process the signals well, we have to find the orig in of the perturbations: one is induced by the eigenmodes of the block-bar which are excited; the second is due to the scheme of reconstruction of the signals. Then, we process the signals to obtain their trend. The results o btained by a numerical 'experiment' confirm our conclusions. (C) 2001 Acade mic Press.