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Lesson1 Intro To Damping

This document discusses damping and its effects on vibration. Damping reduces the magnitude of vibration by dissipating the energy of a system in the form of heat, sound, or other energy. It provides two examples - a treadmill vibration isolator which uses rubber/foam pads as dampers, and a guitar string which naturally decays over time due to material and air damping. Accurately modeling damping is important for predicting a system's dynamic response, as without it, models will overpredict responses. Damping values may not be known exactly, so best practices, testing, or conservative low values are commonly used.

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43 views

Lesson1 Intro To Damping

This document discusses damping and its effects on vibration. Damping reduces the magnitude of vibration by dissipating the energy of a system in the form of heat, sound, or other energy. It provides two examples - a treadmill vibration isolator which uses rubber/foam pads as dampers, and a guitar string which naturally decays over time due to material and air damping. Accurately modeling damping is important for predicting a system's dynamic response, as without it, models will overpredict responses. Damping values may not be known exactly, so best practices, testing, or conservative low values are commonly used.

Uploaded by

luca
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Intro to Damping

Damping Effects – Lesson 1


Motivation

• Damping, in the context of vibration, is what tends to reduce the magnitude of the vibration.
• This happens because of the dissipation of energy of the system in the form of heat, sound or other
forms of energy.
• Let’s have a look at a few examples of damped systems to illustrate the concept.

1 Treadmill vibration isolator 2 Guitar string

2
Motivation (cont.)

1 Treadmill vibration isolator


• This is a forced vibration case, in which the isolator pads at
the floor act as a damper.
• The repeated loading of the runner’s feet cause the
treadmill to bounce.
• By properly engineering the isolator (damper) the motion
and noise of the treadmill as well as the comfort of the
runner can be controlled.
• The type of damping by these rubber/foam isolator pads is
called material damping.
• A simplified representation would be a spring-mass damper
as shown here, where different levels of damping are
specified, resulting in changes to the maximum rebound
displacement of the treadmill.

3
Motivation (cont.)

2 Guitar String
• This is a free vibration case where the string is plucked
once and allowed to vibrate at its natural frequency
• In this case, the observed damping is the natural decay of
the vibration and associated volume of the note
• Since the string is just plucked once, the energy put into
the string does not repeat, and the amplitude of the string
vibration decreases over time as shown by the orange
curve
• The magnitude of the damping can be computed from the
amplitude peaks (orange curve) and will be covered in a
later section
• The damping of the guitar string is a combination of
material damping and viscous damping of the surrounding
air

4
Motivation (cont.)
• So…damping acts to reduce vibrations in a system.
• This is done by dissipating the energy of the system in the form or heat, sound or other forms of energy.
• As a result, the kinetic energy of the system gradually drops and reduces the tendency of the system to
vibrate.
• To accurately predict the dynamic response of a system, the proper damping needs to be specified.
‐ Specifically, without damping, the numerical models will overpredict the response and be too conservative.
• Often, we do not know the actual damping numerical value, so what is commonly done?
‐ Use established best practices.
‐ Dynamically test for it (discussed later).
‐ Worst case can be to specify a low value which will typically result in conservatively higher displacements,
velocities, stresses, etc.

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