Analysis and optimization of the effects of frictional and viscous dampers on dynamical systems

Over the last several years, the complexity of products has been increasing in parallel to the product cost thus becoming one of main focal points for development. On the other hand, although several applications struggle to fix vibration problems, highlighting the importance of damper design, literature that compares the benefits and disadvantages between of dry-frictional, viscous, and Coulomb–viscous dampers is still rare. Owing to this, the main goal of this work is to present a study that compares the dynamical response of mechanical systems against several damper types. For this research, we analyzed the effects of three types of damper (viscous, Coulomb–viscous, and dry-frictional dampers) on two mechanical systems. The first system consists of a mass-spring-damper with one degree of freedom, while the second system is a rotational machine with three degrees of freedom. The sensibility analyses of each damper were also studied, where the viscosity, Coulomb force, static friction, and Stribeck decay were the variables. In this work, mechanical systems were studied in a forced vibration condition and analyzed in the time and frequency domain in addition to identifying the main transfer functions in the frequency domain. In this analysis, the displacement, receptance, and force reaction were considered to be the study responses. After analyzing the main effect of damper coefficients on the general dynamic responses, we performed an optimization study in order to evidence the optimal configurations of either majorly viscous or frictional damper. Lastly, we analyzed the main behavior of this optimized damper on three-degrees-of-freedom rotational dynamic system.