Vibration Damping of Structural Elements

For years, vibration damping as a technology has been well received by various industries, however, very few books exist on this subject. In 1985, Nashif, Jones, and Henderson published an excellent book entitled Vibration Damping which provides practical and detailed information on the research and development work ranging from the fundamentals of vibration damping to design aspects in many practical applications in this subject area. Our intent is that the contents of this book be considered as a continuation of and complementary to the above work rather than competitive in the technical subject of vibration damping. This book is intended as a reference book for aerospace, mechanical, civil, and acoustical engineers. It should also serve as a valuable reference work for graduate students, professors, and researchers in the area of Aerospace Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Engineering Mechanics. This book consists of eight chapters. The first three chapters address the fundamentals of vibration damping, properties of viscoelastic damping materials, vibrations of discrete damped systems, and damping of fiber-reinforced composite materials. Chapters four to seven present vibrations of damped structures for beams, plates, rings, and shells. In chapter eight, a finite element numerical method is presented to solve vibration problems of beam and plate structures with a partially attached damping treatment on the surface of the structures. The effect of initial loading is also included. Originally, a chapter to address the vibrations of damped cylindrical shells with curved elements was planned. A series of outstanding papers on this specific subject were published by Dr. Michael El-Raheb and his colleague Mr. Paul Wagner. However, the research work was performed for their specific purposes and no numerical solutions on the vibrations of shell structures without incorporating the enclosed fluid medium was available. We regret that these materials are unable to be included in this book. Instead, we have added paragraphs pertaining to this subject topic at the end of Chapter 7 which deals with vibrations of constrained damped cylindrical shell structures. It should be pointed out that this book deals with vibration damping characteristics of structures or systems employing damping materials. We use the properties of the viscoelastic materials in the vibration analysis, but the detailed analysis regarding their material behaviors will not be our primary concern. The book addresses the vibration damping of structural elements, and is not a materials oriented book. This book emphasizes analyses in the presentation of damped structural systems, their validations and verifications. This is done because the authors feel that analyses are the tools which not only enable us to better understand the complicated physical phenomena, but also can help calculate the physical quantities which are useful in practical applications. One might be critical of the fact that there are not enough tables and figures which may be used directly and readily for design purposes. Our reply is that much of this information for damped beam structures may be found in the book by Nashif, Jones, and Henderson. Additionally, because information pertinent to damped structures other than beams may not be available and because the vibration characteristics of damped structures depend strongly on the realistic (not assumed) properties of the damping materials employed as well as the geometrical parameters of the structures considered, we strongly believe that the presentation of Odesign dataO should be reduced to a minimum unless the geometrical and particularly the damping material parameters of a given damped structural system are specified. Since it is technically difficult to develop and to manufacture viscoelastic materials, the damping material properties can not be assumed for mateSun, C. T. is the author of 'Vibration Damping of Structural Elements', published 1995 under ISBN 9780130792297 and ISBN 0130792292.