Experimental Contact Model Calibration for Computing a Vibrating Beam Coupled to a Granular Chain Impact Damper

Impact dampers of various designs are currently used for mitigating vibrations of industrial components. Although they may generate disturbing noise, these devices offer many advantages, as they are quite robust, exempt from fine-tuning and stand severe temperature and environmental conditions. Moreover, they can be applied to systems subjected to wideband excitations, which is a major advantage. However, they are highly nonlinear, hence the numerical modelling issues and the difficulties to predict their behaviour and to optimize their design. This work addresses some basic steps to increase our understanding of such devices, focusing on the family of “simple” chain impact dampers, composed of one or several spheres impacting inside a guide-tube. Damping of such 1-D device is related to the visco-elasticity of the impacting spheres, with only residual friction phenomena. In practice, this device can easily be coupled to any structure, such as the clamped-free vibrating beam as used in the present work. In this paper, we report the detailed dynamical modelling of the beam-damper coupled system and present preliminary simulation results obtained from a model calibrated based on experimental data stemming from modal analysis and drop test experiments.