Verification of the functional reliability of some electrical components under the action of mechanical shock is often desired. As an example, contact chatter (the closure for short-time intervals) of the normally open contact points in a thermal switch is a possible failure mode which must be "screened out" by testing. Theoretically, it should be possible to do this acceptance testing with a centrifuge at a lower cost if one could determine the centrifuge acceleration level needed to produce the maximum displacement that could be realized under a given shock loading. A method was derived to determine this displacement relationship for the two different types of loads. A superposition-of-modes technique was used to develop the relationship. Numerical results are presented for a simple cantilever where closed-form solutions for modal parameters are readily available. The peak response in each mode is determined and all such peaks are summed to determine the maximum that could be realized from a base-excited, haversine acceleration pulse. This numerical result is then compared with the centrifuge-induced displacement to determine the desired relationship. This result was then successfully used to infer the centrifuge level needed to test a small, mechanically complicated, thermal switch.
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