Evaluation of transmissibility for a class of nonlinear passive vibration isolators

In this study, the concept of Output Frequency Response Functions (OFRFs) is applied to represent the transmissibility of nonlinear isolators in frequency domain. With the OFRFs estimated from numerical simulation responses, an explicit analytical relationship between the transmissibility and the nonlinear characteristic parameters is derived for a wide class of nonlinear isolators that have nonlinear anti-symmetric damping characteristics and a comprehensive pattern about how the nonlinear damping characteristic parameters might affect the force and displacement transmissibility is built for the vibration isolators. The results reveal that it is reasonable to analyze the force and displacement transmissibility of the nonlinear isolators by simply investigating the fundamental harmonic components of the force and displacement outputs of the nonlinear isolators, and the introduction of a nonlinear anti-symmetric damping into vibration isolators can significantly suppress both the force and displacement transmissibility over the resonant frequency region, but has almost no effect on the transmissibility at non-resonant regions. These conclusions are of significant importance in the analysis and design of the nonlinear vibration isolators with nonlinear anti-symmetric damping.