The analysis of arbitrarily-damped linear mechanical systems

Summary The analysis of arbitrarily-damped linear mechanical systems is the subject of this paper, the main issue being the analysis of nondecouplable systems. It is well known that decouplable systems occur when the damping matrix happens to be a linear combination of the mass and stiffness matrices. Systems with this type of damping are said to have proportional damping, which nevertheless seldom occurs in practice, but many a damped system is analyzed under the assumption that it is proportionally damped. In fact, this property allows the analyst to study these systems using the same approach as that applicable to their undamped counterparts. In this paper, we show that proportional damping need not be assumed in order to analyze the system at hand with the same approach as used to analyze undamped systems. Moreover, we propose an algorithm to determine the natural frequencies, the damped frequencies and the damping ratios of an n-degree-of-freedom damped system, that does not require the casting of the system into first-order form. In this way, the characteristic equation is derived naturally as a 2n-degree polynomial, computing its roots being then straightforward. Furthermore, we propose a semigraphical method to ease this calculation, which should be attractive to practicing engineers. Received 5 April 1999; accepted for publication 7 May 1999