Modern Era of Experimental Modal Analysis: One Historical Perspective, The

Sound and Vibration, Jan 2007 by Brown, David L, Allemang, Randall J

The format for the industrial support process was accomplished by defining an industrial project where industry and the university cooperated in solving a specific problem. In this early phase, the educational process was truly mutual with industry mentoring students (developing an understanding of the industrial problems) and university personnel educating industry (developing an understanding of how new emerging technologies would meet their needs). The end result of this process was a solution to a difficult problem and the education of both the university and industy.

There were also students from a large number of disciplines (mechanical, aerospace, metallurgical, electrical engineering, physics, chemistry, etc.), and these students mentored each other on their various projects. This, coupled with a large number of social activities in the UC-SDRL (parties, picnics, etc.), helped to bond the students. It was an exciting educational environment. Lifetime friendships were developed which were later important in the continuing development of UC-SDRL and the formation of SDRC.

As the Laboratory learned how to implement the technologies being developed in various industrial projects, a demand began to emerge for a consulting activity to routinely solve these types of problems. It was clear that an engineering service business could be formed which could perform this service and provide the type of response that industry demanded. However, this type of short-term, time-critical response is in general not compatible with having students perform the work while they are pursuing a degree and must attend class. Requiring graduate students to provide these engineering services on a continuing basis took too much time from both their university education and their research efforts. Jack's solution was to form an engineering service company outside of the university to provide a service which industry clearly needed. His initial concept was that UC-SDRL would continue to educate graduate students and interact with industry by concentrating on developing the newer technologies, and the service company (which became the Structural Dynamics Research Corporation, SDRC) would provide the service to industry while funding projects at the University which were more compatible with the University's education and research mission.

At that time, Jack planned to stay actively involved with the UC-SDRL. Unfortunately, this was not possible, and Jack formally left the university to form SDRC in 1967. SDRC became one of the dominant industries in the engineering services business internationally as well as providing education and the development of state-of-the-art analysis software for industry. SDRC also became one of the university's largest cooperative engineering employers and spawned a number of spin-off companies. Figure 3 is a schematic that represents a number of the companies that are or were active in the area of structural dynamics that can trace their roots back to the research activity at the University of Cincinnati that began in 1964. Over the years, hundreds of students from the University of Cincinnati, and to a lesser extent from other universities, have been involved in this cooperative experience with companies that trace their history to the University of Cincinnati structural dynamics legacy.