Analytical Modeling of a Particle Impact Damper on a Cantilever Beam

A particle impact damper (PID) or shot mass damper (SMD) is a particle-filled enclosure used as a passive damping device attached to vibrating structures. Damping mechanisms in PIDs involve internal friction and momentum transfer through inelastic impacts, which causes the rate of energy dissipation to be amplitude dependent and particle damping process to be highly nonlinear. A majority of previous studies have focused on horizontal excitation for particle damping where gravity is not taken into account. Vertically excited systems have also been studied in the literature, in which the excitation has generally been considered to be harmonic. However, analyses with harmonic disturbances break down for systems where repetitive impacts occur, such as manufacturing and maintaining aircraft structures with the operations of riveting and chiseling. This paper is concerned with developing an analysis method for a PID under periodic impulse excitation in the vertical direction. Particle damping is analyzed for a cantilever beam with a PID attached to various locations of the beam.