Effects of dry friction damping on the occurrence of localized forced vibrations in nearly cyclic structures

A multi-harmonic balance method is applied to analyze the occurrence of strongly localized forced vibrations in a mistuned cyclic assembly of coupled, non-linear component structures under traveling wave excitation. In addition to considering the effects of the strength of coupling between and disorder among component systems, the study also investigates the relative effects of dry friction damping and viscous damping on the occurrence of strong localization. Results indicate that the degree of localization decreases as the amount of damping increases and that dry friction damped systems are more susceptible to localized vibrations than viscously damped ones. This multi-degree-of-freedom system with many dry friction dampers is analyzed by a multi-harmonic frequency domain procedure. The issues of accuracy and convergence of the method when applied to systems with several strongly non-linear elements are discussed. This frequency domain solution technique is compared to time domain methods. 1