Viscoelastic (VE) dampers are widely used to attenuate structural vibration. Studies
have mainly focused on the employment of VE dampers for reducing structural
vibration in normal conditions, and only a few studies have considered the
microvibration condition. In this paper, theoretical and experimental studies on the
VE microvibration damper are conducted. First, the damping mechanism of the VE
microvibration damper is analyzed from microperspectives and a mathematical
model based on the chain network model is proposed. The contributions of
cross-link and free-chain network chains to the damping characteristics of VE
material are considered in this model. Second, an experimental study of the
VE microvibration damper is conducted to verify the proposed model and
to reveal the dynamic properties of the VE microvibration damper. The
experimental results show that the dynamic properties of VE material are
influenced by excitation frequency and insignificantly affected by displacement
amplitude, and the VE material has good energy dissipation capacity. The
proposed model is verified by comparing the experimental data and the
numerical results. The results indicate that the proposed model can accurately
describe the dynamic properties of the VE microvibration damper at different
frequencies.
Keywords
viscoelastic microvibration damper, high energy
dissipation, material microstructure, chain structure
model, performance test