The transmissibility of vibration isolators with a nonlinear anti-symmetric damping characteristic

In the present study, the concept of the Output Frequency Response Function (OFRF), recently proposed by the authors, is applied to theoretically investigate the transmissibility of SDOF passive vibration isolators with a nonlinear anti-symmetric damping curve. The results reveal that a nonlinear anti-symmetric damping characteristic has almost no effect on the transmissibility of SDOF vibration isolators over both low and high frequency ranges where the frequencies are much lower or higher than the isolator’s resonant frequency. On the other hand, the introduction of a nonlinear anti-symmetric damping can significantly reduce the transmissibility of the vibration isolator over the resonant frequency region. The results indicate that nonlinear vibration isolators with an anti-symmetric damping characteristic have great potential to overcome the dilemma encountered in the design of passive linear vibration isolators, that is, increasing the level of damping to reduce the transmissibility at the resonance could increase the transmissibility over the range of higher frequencies. These important theoretical conclusions are then verified by simulation studies.