Running two shakers together to drive a single test table or test article is a common way to achieve a higher force capability. But when doing so, there is a serious risk of damaging your shakers or over-testing your test article – and the only way to ensure this doesn’t happen is to have the correct controller.

Many controllers will just split the drive signal to two shakers, use a “phase matching” piece of electronics, or use two separate control loops to try and coax two shakers to work well together. This not only gets suboptimal results – it is risky.

When driving two shakers in such a way, the controller has no way to know if the shakers are fighting each other. The two shakers can be outputting forces that cancel each other out – and there will be no detectable acceleration response. This is an easy way to overdrive your shakers and exert extreme stress through the test article or table.

To help you avoid these costly mistakes, the 900 Series vibration controller employs a MIMO control algorithm which has the appropriate settings to ensure the shakers don’t fight each other. It measures and uses the exact amplitude and phase response of each shaker – and when generating the drive for each shaker it ensures that they don’t generate opposing forces. This allows for correct control – and more importantly, the safest execution of a dual shaker test.

Read more about these important multi shaker testing safety considerations.