The advantage of linear viscoelastic material behavior in passive damper design-with application in broad-banded resonance dampers for industrial high-precision motion stages

In this paper we demonstrate the advantage of applying viscoelastic materials instead of purely viscous materials as damping medium in mechanical dampers. Although the loss modulus decreases as function of frequency in case of viscoelastic behavior, which can be interpreted as a decrease of damping, the viscoelastic behavior still leads to an increased modal damping for mechanical structures. This advantage holds for inertial-mass-type dampers that are tuned for broad-banded resonance damping. It turns out that an increase of the storage modulus as function of frequency contributes to the effectiveness of mechanical dampers with respect to energy dissipation at different mechanical resonance frequencies. It is shown that this phenomenon is medium specific and is independent of the amount of damper mass