Super Damping of Mechanical Vibrations

We report the phenomenon of coherent super decay (CSD), where a linear sum of the displacement of several damped oscillators can collectively decay much faster than the individual ones in the first stage, followed by stagnating ones after more than 97% of the energy has been dissipated. The parameters of the damped oscillators for CSD are determined by the process of response function decomposition, which is to use several slow decay response functions to approximate the response function of a fast decay resonator. Evidence established in experiments and in finite element numerical simulations not only strongly supported the numerical investigations, but also uncovered an unexplored region of the tuned mass damper (TMD) parameter space where TMD’s with total mass less than 0.2% of a stainless steel plate can damp its first resonance at 100 Hz up to a damping ratio of 4.6%. Our findings also shed light onto the intriguing underline relationships between complex functions with different singular points.