English

Abstract

Everything in the universe that has mass possesses stiffness and intrinsic damping. Owing to the stiffness property, mass will vibrate when excited and its intrinsic damping property will act to stop the vibration. The particle impact damper (PID) is a very interesting damper that affects impact and friction effects of particles by means of energy dissipation. PID is a means for achieving high structural damping by using a particle-filled enclosure attached to a structure. The particles absorb the kinetic energy of the structure and convert it into heat through inelastic collisions between the particles themselves and between the particles and the walls of the enclosure. In this work, PID is measured for a cantilever mild steel beam with an enclosure attached to its free end; copper particles are used in this study. The PID is found to be highly nonlinear. The most useful observation is that for a very small weight penalty (about 7% to 8 %), the maximum damped amplitude of vibration at resonance with a PID, is about 9 to 10 times smaller than that without a PID. It is for more than that of with only intrinsic material damping of a majority of structural metals. A satisfactory comparison of damping with and without particles through experimentation is observed. The effect of the size of the particles on the damping performance of the beam and the effective packing ratio can be identified. It is also shown that as the packing ratio changes, the contributions of the phenomena of impact and friction towards damping also change. It is encouraging that despite its deceptive simplicity, the model captures the essential physics of PID.