Comparison of Linear and Nonlinear Damping Effects on a Ring Vibration Isolator

Nonlinear isolators in the shape of a circular ring have been shown to have an advantage over linear isolators in that they allow low-frequency vibration isolation. These isolators have generally been assumed to possess linear viscous damping, which degrades the performance of the isolator at high frequencies. An alternative design is to make use of nonlinear damping, where the nonlinear behavior is achieved by placing linear dampers, so that they are orthogonal to the motion of the isolator. In this work, the performance of circular ring isolators with this type of damping is compared with the corresponding isolators exhibiting linear viscous damping only. It is found that the isolators with linear viscous damping perform better around the resonance frequencies, but the isolators with nonlinear damping perform better at high frequencies.