Driven by the need for impact resistance and vibration reduction for mechanical devices in extreme environments, an all-metal vibration isolator with 6-degree-of-freedom (6-DOF) motion that is horizontally symmetrical was developed. Its stiffness and damping ability are provided by oblique springs in symmetrical arrangement and a metal–rubber elasto-porous damper. The spring is symmetrically distributed in the center axis of the support load surface. It is necessary to investigate the kinematics and the singularity before conducting multi-body dynamics analysis of the vibration isolator. Based on the theory of dual quaternions, the forward kinematics equations of the isolator were successively derived for theoretical kinematics modeling. In addition, an enhanced Broyden numerical iterative algorithm was developed and applied to the numerical solution of the forward kinematics equations of the vibration isolator. Compared with the traditional rotation-matrix method and Newton–Raphson method, the computational efficiency of the enhanced Broyden numerical iterative algorithm was increased by 680% and 290%, respectively. This was due to the enhanced algorithm without the calculations of any inverse matrix and forward kinematics equations. Finally, according to the forward kinematics Jacobian matrix, the position-singularity trajectory at a given orientation and the orientation-singularity space at a given position are calculated, which provides a basis for the algorithm of the 6-DOF vibration isolator to avoid singular positions and orientations.
A horizontally symmetric all-metallic vibration isolator (AM-VI) is proposed to further investigate the dynamic mechanical performance. The novel AM-VI was constructed by combining hat-shaped metal rubber and oblique springs, which were connected in parallel. The springs were arranged symmetrically relative to the support. The elliptic method and the frequency sweeping method were used to compare the dynamic stiffness and the loss factor of the AM-VI. The results demonstrated that the dynamic stiffness and the loss factor calculated by two distinct test methodologies were considerably different, indicating that the inertial force effect of the dynamic testing equipment should be taken into count when adopting the elliptic method. Furthermore, when the vibration isolation performance was evaluated by utilizing mechanical impedance and force transmissibility, the AM-VI achieved excellent vibration isolation performance within a broad frequency range.
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