Experimental investigation of damping flexural vibrations using granular materials

Granular materials can be used for damping structural vibrations by dissipating the vibration energy via collisions and friction between granular particles. In the present work, a series of experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of the main parameters of granular materials and the containers on vibration damping. In particular, it has been shown that smaller particles and particles made of a denser material damp vibrations more efficiently, which agrees with other published works. Further investigations have been carried out to study the effect of replacement of particles with powders. Other investigations included the use of larger irregular particles and small machine swarf particles. It was found that the larger irregular particles did make a successful damper. It should be noted that the use of irregular particles could dramatically reduce the cost in real life applications. Finally, direct comparisons were made between some traditional damping methods and the method using granular materials.