Experimental Determination of Structural Damping of Different Materials

Estimating damping in structure composed of different materials (steel, brass, aluminum) and processes still remains as one of the most extremely vast challengers. The paper presents Structural damping effect on beam vibration by impact hammer. Structural damping contributes to about 10-15% of total system damping. The main objective of this work is to estimate the natural frequency and damping ratio of cantilever beams of Aluminum, Brass, and Steel by LabVIEW software and validate the result with vibration analysis and Harmonic analysis utilizing ANSYS. Free vibration analysis was carried out for identifying the natural frequencies and the harmonic analysis was carried out for obtaining frequency replication curves from which damping ratios were estimated utilizing Half- power Band Width Method. It is observed that damping ratio is higher for brass than steel than aluminum.