Study on the force transmissibility of vibration isolators with geometric nonlinear damping

By a special layout of the damper in a vibration isolation system, the velocity-nth power damping of the damper can be transformed into the velocity-displacement dependent damping in the moving direction due to geometric nonlinearity. This study is mainly concerned with the mechanism of this geometric nonlinear damping and tries to find some guidelines for designing isolators with high performance, regardless of the isolator is passive or active. The model used in this study is an unconstrained two-degree-of-freedom isolation system, which is suitable for investigating vibration isolation in space vehicles. The motion equation is solved by the averaging method to obtain the amplitude–frequency equation. The influence of damping coefficients on the force transmissibility is analyzed. Results show that this kind of damping has some advantages in improving isolation performance at both the resonance and higher frequencies. Meanwhile, it can also degrade the isolation performance if unreasonable parameters are chosen.