Mechanical Vibration

Week #3

Free Vibration of Single-Degree-of-Freedom Systems

Free Vibration with Viscous Damping
Equation of Motion

The viscous damping force F is

proportional to the velocity and can be
expressed as

If x is measured from the equilibrium

position of the mass m, the application
of Newton s law yields the equation of
motion:

Single-degree-of-freedom system
…………….….2.6 with viscous damper.
Solution
These roots give two solutions

To solve, we assume a solution in the

form

Thus the general solution is given by a

combination of the two solutions
where C and s are undetermined
constants. Insert to equation 2.6
gives characteristic equation

where C1 and C2 are arbitrary

the roots of which are constants to be determined from the
initial conditions of the system.

…………….….2.7
Critical Damping Constant and the Damping Ratio

The critical damping is defined as the

value of the damping constant c for which Using Eq 2.9 and 2.8, we can
the radical in Eq. 2.7 becomes zero: write

therefore
…………….….2.8

The damping ratio zeta is defined as

the ratio of the damping constant to Thus the solution can be
the critical damping constant: written as

…………….….2.9

…………….….2.10
Case 1. Underdamped system

is negative, therefore

and the solution, Eq. 2.10, can be written in

different forms:
The motion is a damped harmonic motion of angular frequency
but the amplitude decreases exponentially with time, as shown below
 Underdamped solution

The quantity is called the frequency of damped vibration.

 the frequency of damped vibration omegad is always less than the undamped natural
frequency omegan.

 The underdamped case is very important in the study of mechanical vibrations, as it is

the only case that leads to an oscillatory motion
Case 2. Critically damped system

In this case the two roots s1 and s2 are equal

Because of the repeated roots, the solution of is

given by

The application of the initial conditions gives

and the solution becomes

It can be seen that the motion

…………….….2.11
is aperiodic (i.e., nonperiodic).
Comparison of motions with different types of damping
Case 3. Overdamped system

the roots s1 and s2 are real and distinct and are given by

the solution, can be expressed as

 The motion is aperiodic

regardless of the initial
conditions imposed on the
system
Logarithmic Decrement
which can be rewritten as
The logarithmic decrement represents the
rate at which the amplitude of a free-
damped vibration decreases

The logarithmic decrement can be

obtained by

For small damping, can be approximated

  logarithmic decrement is dimensionless and is actually another form of the
The
dimensionless damping ratio . Once is known, can be found by

For small damping ratio, we can use

If the damping in the given system is not known, we can determine it experimentally by
 
measuring any two consecutive displacements x1 and x2. By taking the natural
logarithm of the ratio of x1 and x2 we obtain
Torsional Systems with Viscous Damping

The viscous damping torque is given by

ct is the torsional viscous damping constant

The equation of motion can be derived as

J0 is mass moment inertia
of the disc kt is spring
constant of the system

The solution can be found exactly as in the case

of linear vibrations.
For example, in the underdamped case, the frequency of damped vibration
is given by

where

and

where ctc is the critical torsional damping constant