Design and experimental analysis of new industrial vibration dampers

Vibration dampers are the first line of defense against shock and impacts sustained by mechanical and structural systems. Consequently, for decades, new impact damping technologies have been developed and applied in several engineering fields to attenuate undesired vibrations. Linear particle chain (LPC) impact dampers are the latest category of impact dampers being developed for the mitigation of unwanted vibrations in many systems. However, the challenges associated with prototyping such devices made their application in practical systems very limited. This paper proposes five innovative designs for the LPC impact dampers satisfying a wide range of industry needs in terms of efficiency, cost, and sustainability. The proposed designs are fabricated and tested under the same conditions to assess their efficiency in attenuating the vibration of a simple structure. Each design showed consistent behavior, but some designs outperformed others depending on the geometry, physical characteristics, and type of structure. The detailed design, experimental study, and time response comparisons are presented here to provide an initial study towards the development of practical sustainable LPC vibration dampers for real engineering applications.