Experimental and Numerical Investigation of the Damping Performance of Metal Additively Manufactured Particle Damper

The additively manufactured particle damper (AMPD) is a novel particle damper fabricated by leaving unfused powder inside the pre-designed structural cavities during the laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) process. It can be applied at high temperatures and a wide range of frequencies without any additional installation space. However, the damping mechanism and performance of AMPD are still unclear due to insufficient experimental and simulation analyses. In this work, the damping capacity of AMPDs with three different unit cell sizes at high frequencies and low vibration amplitudes were investigated experimentally and numerically. The AMPDs were manufactured using LPBD with 316 L stainless steel. The complex power method was used to measure the energy dissipation of the AMPD directly. A discrete element method (DEM) simulation model was developed to visualize the particle motion mode during each vibration process. The computed tomography (CT) pictures were utilized to measure the powder distribution in each AMPD's cavity. Finally, the influence of excitation frequency, excitation amplitude, and cavity size on the damping performance of the AMPD were explained by comparing the experimental and simulation results.