Damping capacity measurement of elastic porous wire-mesh material in wide temperature range

Elastic porous wire-mesh (EPWM) material is a new type of functional damping material made of stainless steel wires. Bending or extrusion deformation of EPWM material induced by external excitations will lead to contact friction across interface between the adjacent crisscross wires, and the vibration energy is dissipated by friction damping. Because of the nonlinear characteristic, the common damping capacity measurement methods based on linear materials are unsuitable for EPWM. So a new damping capacity measurement method based on decomposition of the hysteresis curve was put forward in this paper. This method takes the constitutive mechanical model for EPWM material including the asymmetric nonlinear elastic force, viscous damping and hysteresis Coulomb damping into consideration, and improves the damping measurement accuracy for nonlinear material. A clamped-edge disk-shaped EPWM isolator was designed, and its loss factor was measured in the temperature range from −70 to 300 °C. The experimental results show that EPWM material has excellent damping performance with loss factor about 0.2–0.3, and its damping capacity exhibits good resistance of high–low temperature, especially compared with traditional damping rubber material.