Structural damping identification method using normal FRFs

All structures exhibit some form of damping, but despite a large literature on the damping, it still remains one of the least well-understood aspects of general vibration analysis. The synthesis of damping in structural systems and machines is extremely important if a model is to be used in predicting vibration levels, transient responses, transmissibility, decay times or other characteristics in design and analysis that are dominated by energy dissipation. In this paper, new structural damping identification method using normal frequency response functions (NFRFs) which are obtained experimentally is proposed and tested with the objective that the damped finite element model is able to predict the measured FRFs accurately. The proposed structural damping identification is a direct method. In the proposed method, normal FRFs are estimated from the complex FRFs, which are obtained experimentally of the structure. The estimated normal FRFs are subsequently used for identification of general structural damping. The effectiveness of the proposed structural damping identification method is demonstrated by two numerical simulated examples and one real experimental data. Firstly, a study is performed using a lumped mass system. The lumped mass system study is followed by case involving numerical simulation of fixed-fixed beam. The effect of coordinate incompleteness and robustness of method under presence of noise is investigated. The performance of the proposed structural damping identification method is investigated for cases of light, medium, heavily and non-proportional damped structures. The numerical studies are followed by a case involving actual measured data for the case of a cantilever beam structure. The results have shown that the proposed damping identification method can be used to derive an accurate general structural damping model of the system. This is illustrated by matching the damped identified FRFs with the experimentally obtained FRFs.