Development of a Tuned Rolling Granular Damper

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel tuned rolling granular damper. The damper consists of a cylindrical container partially filled with granular materials. The container, rotating on the cylindrical surface of the primary mass, is used as a tuned vibration absorber. The friction and the collision between the granular materials and the walls of the cavity results in an energy dissipation. The advantage of the damper is that it has simple structure and can operate in extreme temperature environments, where most conventional dampers would fail. This paper investigates the damping efficiency in a horizontally vibrating system under sinusoidal excitation. The granular particles used in this study are made of steel and are of uniform size. It is shown that the mass ratio and particle size influence the damping performance. The validity of this damping is examined by a comparison of the response of the primary mass between the experimental result and analytical result obtained using conventional tuned rotary-mass damper.