Hybrid viscous-structural damping identification method

Abstract

Damping still remains one of the least well-understood aspects of general vibration analysis. The effects of damping are clear, but the characterization of damping is a puzzle waiting to be solved. A major reason for this is that, in contrast with inertia and stiffness forces, it is not clear which state variables are relevant to determine the damping forces. In this paper, a new hybrid viscous-structural damping identification method is proposed. The proposed method is a direct method and gives explicit structural and viscous damping matrices. The effectiveness of the proposed structural damping identification method is demonstrated by two numerical examples. First, numerical study of lumped mass system is presented which is followed by a numerical study of fixed-fixed beam. The effects of coordinate incompleteness and different level of damping are investigated. The results have shown that the proposed method is able to identify accurately the damping of the system.