The material damping as Rayleigh damping in the vibrations of square and rectangular metalic plates

In this paper, an experimental investigation is carried out on square and rectangular plates of different materials with various edge conditions to estimate the Rayleigh damping coefficients. The determination of Rayleigh damping coefficients has become an important aspect of the dynamical analysis of delicate mechanical structural elements such as robotic arm manipulators, panels in space crafts and numerically controlled precision machine tools. The coefficients thus obtained are reinvestigated for a two-parameter model. Damping ratios can be determined by using estimated coefficients to assemble the Rayleigh damping matrix [C]. This method has been found to be very effective in the computation of the transient response using modal superposition technique and provides a methodology to have predictive computations of dynamic responses.