Experimental Characterization Of Metal-Mesh Isolator'S Damping Capacity By Constitutive Mechanical Model

Metal mesh isolator is made of metallic wires. It has been widely used in vibration control engineering applications such as isolation mounting of machine tools. To investigate the performance of the metallic wires material, a set of dynamic tests was conducted for a range of frequencies and amplitudes of loading. The experimental results has demonstrated that the output of the isolator is revealed to the loading amplitude, however, slightly dependent to the loading frequency. As the loading amplitude increases, the dynamic mechanical property exhibits asymmetrical characteristic. Therefore, a model that includes the asymmetric non-linear elastic force, viscous damping and hysteretic coulomb friction is setup to describe the dynamic general restoring force. In this paper, an experimental identification methodology is presented to determine the unknown parameters of the constitutive mechanical model. The Bouc-Wen model was implemented to identify the unknown parameters of the hysteretic damping force. In order to measure the equivalent loss factor of nonlinear material, a damping capacity measurement method, based on the decomposition of the hysteresis loop, is brought forward. The equivalent loss factor of the metallic-wires material at different loading frequencies and amplitudes were measured through a damping capacity measurement method, based on the decomposition of the hysteresis loop. The results show that this material has excellent damping performance with loss factor about 0.4-0.5 for lower frequency and amplitude.