An investigation into the transferability of dynamic elastomer dampers’ properties between different damper sizes using FEM

Abstract

Elastomer dampers are used in drive systems to systematically adjust the systems’ vibration behavior. Selecting the right damper therefore requires model-based prediction of the system’s vibrations. Modelling elastomer dampers in the system context involves a high degree of complexity, since non-linear material effects in elastomers, such as the dependence of material properties on loading speed and history, make it difficult to predict the material behavior. This complexity hinders the model parameters of elastomer dampers to be determined from physical parameters such as material composition and geometric quantities. Instead, abstract models must be used that represent the material behavior phenomenologically and that are parameterized via experimental investigations on each individual damper. The diversity of variants as well as customly produced dampers mean that manufacturers and industrial applicators of elastomer dampers are confronted with disproportionately large numbers of required experiments.The aim of this work is to reduce the number of required experiments by inferring the behavior of various different elastomer dampers from experiments on a single damper. For this purpose, it is assumed that separating the influence of the damper’s geometry and the influence of the material is possible, while the geometries’ influence can be predicted by abstracting parts of the phenomenological model via a simple FE model. The method is exemplarily demonstrated by predicting the transmission behavior of two torsional loaded elastomer couplings from experiments on a test specimen. The method is validated by comparing predicted and measured dynamic stiffness of the investigated couplings.