This paper aims to develop viscoelastic dampers, which can effectively suppress vibration in a wide frequency range. First, several viscoelastic materials for damping performance were selected, and different batches of cylindrical viscoelastic dampers were fabricated by overall vulcanization. Second, the dynamic mechanical properties of the cylindrical viscoelastic dampers under different amplitudes and frequencies are tested, and the hysteretic curves under different loading conditions are obtained. Finally, by calculating the dynamic mechanical properties of the cylindrical viscoelastic dampers, the energy dissipation performance of these different batches of viscoelastic dampers is compared and analyzed. The experimental results show that the cylindrical viscoelastic damper presents a full hysteretic curve in a wide frequency range, in which the maximum loss factor can reach 0.57. Besides, the equivalent stiffness, storage modulus, loss factor, and energy consumption per cycle of the viscoelastic damper raise with the frequency increasing, while the equivalent damping decreases with the increase of frequency. When the displacement increases, the energy consumption per cycle of the viscoelastic damper rises rapidly, and the equivalent stiffness, equivalent damping, storage modulus, and loss factor change slightly.

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ESS (Equivalent Standard solid) model is proofed to be accurate for describing the physical properties of viscoelastic material under different temperatures and excitation frequencies. However, the ESS model faces difficulties for calculating time history responses. Therefore, a two-step transformation approach for ESS model to time domain is proposed, which can obtain precise time history response of structural finite element models of with dampers made of viscoelastic materials. In the first step of the approach, ESS model is extended from frequency domain to complex frequency domain. In the second step, a high-precision numerical inverse Laplace transform method is chosen to transform the model from complex frequency domain to time domain. Experimental and numerical tests are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the two-step transformation approach under simple harmonic external excitation. The comparisons indicate that the approach is accurate under different temperatures and excitation frequencies. Finally, the time domain dynamic responses of the viscoelastic dampers are obtained under earthquake excitations. Comparing to the equivalent linearization method for ESS model, the proposed two-step transformation approach has absolute advantage to obtain accurate results under random excitation, such as earthquake excitations.