Ultralight plat-type vibration damper with designable working bandwidth and strong multi-peak suppression performance

Abstract

This paper proposed a low-frequency vibration damping method which attaches some ultralight locally resonant plate-type units onto the vibration structure as dampers. Owing to the designable band gap property of the units, the structural vibration in the pre-defined band gap range is localized and consumed by the dampers, thereby realizing a vibration damping effect. This damping method achieved vibration attenuation via the band gap characteristics of the local resonance unit, while the band gap properties operated in a frequency band with a certain width, so the vibration within the band gap range could be attenuated effectively. Moreover, as the frequency range, bandwidth and polarization direction of the band gap are tunable by adjusting the configuration and parameters of the unit cell, this vibration damping method shows flexible design potential. The advantage of this damping method was that, in addition to a considerable working bandwidth and convenient designable working frequency range, the additional mass was minimal and negligible. The total weight of the damper could reach levels as low as 0.3‰ of the objective vibration structure, displaying no evident increase in the overall weight. Moreover, even if only a single cell was used, a good damping effect with strong multi-peak suppression performance could be obtained. Compared with conventional methods, this damping method reduced the amplitude of the vibration peak of the original structure but did not generate additional vibration peaks on either side of the reduced peak like previous vibration absorbers. In addition, due to the fact that the configuration of the damper unit can be easily and flexibly designed according to actual application requirements, it has a wide range of engineering applications including but not limiting to aircraft, land-based vehicles, modern industrial equipment, precision instruments and household appliances.