Aj. Keane et Ap. Bright, PASSIVE VIBRATION CONTROL VIA UNUSUAL GEOMETRIES - EXPERIMENTS ON MODEL AEROSPACE STRUCTURES, Journal of sound and vibration, 190(4), 1996, pp. 713-719
In a previous paper [1], one of the present authors described a method
whereby passive vibration isolation could be designed into a lightwei
ght aerospace structure by the adoption of unusual geometric configura
tions. This was achieved by the use of Genetic Algorithm methods to op
timize the isolation characteristics of the structure. The current bri
ef paper follows on from that work and describes an experimental inves
tigation into the performance of the structures designed in the earlie
r study. It is shown that, although the detailed behaviour of the expe
rimental models is somewhat different from that predicted theoreticall
y, the same broadband vibration isolation characteristics shown by the
theory exist in practice. It is seen to be possible to achieve an ave
rage of 50 dB isolation in the vibrational energy transfer between the
ends of a network of beams over a 100 Hz bandwidth in an essentially
undamped structure. These experimental results are sufficiently encour
aging that work is now underway to apply Genetic Algorithm based desig
n methods to more complex structural vibration problems.