A Study of Errors Induced by Decoupling Approximation in Damped Linear Vibratory Systems

Abstract

It is well known that an undamped linear vibratory system can be decoupled through transformation to principal coordinates. In the presence of damping, coordinate decoupling occurs only if the system is classically damped. Upon modal transformation, the system generally remains coupled by the off-diagonal elements of its modal damping matrix. A common approximation in the analysis of nonclassically damped systems is to ignore the off-diagonal elements of the modal damping matrix, which is equivalent to neglecting coupling of the principal coordinates. This procedure is termed the decoupling approximation. Intuitively, the errors of decoupling approximation should be small if the off-diagonal elements of the modal damping matrix are small. Contrary to this widely accepted belief, an example is provided to demonstrate that this criterion is not sufficient for decoupling approximation. In fact, coupling effect can even increase as the off-diagonal elements of the modal damping matrix decrease in magnitude. Discussion and explanation are provided as to why the errors increase when the modal damping matrix becomes increasingly diagonal.