Reducing force transmissibility in multiple degrees of freedom structures through anti-symmetric nonlinear viscous damping

In the present study, the Volterra series theory is adopted to theoretically investigate the force transmissibility of multiple degrees of freedom (MDOF) structures, in which an isolator with nonlinear anti-symmetric viscous damping is assembled. The results reveal that the anti-symmetric nonlinear viscous damping can significantly reduce the force transmissibility over all resonance regions for MDOF structures with little effect on the transmissibility over non-resonant and isolation regions. The results indicate that the vibration isolators with an anti-symmetric damping characteristic have great potential to solve the dilemma occurring in the design of linear viscously damped vibration isolators where an increase of the damping level reduces the force transmissibility over resonant frequencies but increases the transmissibility over non-resonant frequency regions. This work is an extension of a previous study in which MDOF structures installed on the mount through an isolator with cubic nonlinear damping are considered. The theoretical analysis results are also verified by simulation studies.