Damping performance of metal swarfs in a horizontal hollow structure

The scope of this paper is to investigate the damping performance of metal swarfs in hollow structures and to compare its vibration suppression performance with existing granular damping technologies. The effectiveness in suppressing vibrations in a hollow aluminum beam using aluminum, mild steel and stainless steel swarfs is compared to that of rubber spheres. Performance is compared using swept sine wave across a range of amplitudes from 0.1 g to 10 g for both first and the second modes of the beam. Considerable vibration suppression is observed for both modes, and the effect of filler type on damping and natural frequency variation is presented.