VIBRATION ISOLATION IN A THIN RECTANGULAR PLATE USING A LARGE NUMBER OF OPTIMALLY POSITIONED POINT MASSES

A new approach is presented for dealing with the problem of vibration control in a plate over a moderately wide frequency band. The band of interest does not contain the first few eigenvalues, nor is it restric ted to very high frequencies, but typically contains five or six eigen frequencies in the 10's of eigennumber. The idea is to make minor modi fications to the structure which are sufficient to change its frequenc y response so that the transmission of vibrations in a given frequency band is suppressed. This work is illustrated by application to a rect angular plate which carries 50 identical point masses in variable posi tions. A novel method for selecting optimal mass position is demonstra ted and compared with the results for mass positions determined by a G enetic Algorithm (G.A.). (C) 1997 Academic Press Limited.