Experimental Investigation of Normal/Lateral Excitation Direction Influence on the Dynamic Characteristics of Metal Mesh Isolator

Vibrations, considered one of the major problems in the engineering applications, are analyzed to predict their detrimental effects on the equipment and structures. The metal mesh isolator has become widely applied to mitigate the disturbing vibration due to its special production techniques. The metal mesh isolator is a kind of novel style porous damping material that is manufactured via a process of wire-drawing, weaving and compression molding. The influencing laws of the manufacturing parameters including the relative density and the working condition together with the excitation direction dependence should be taken into account in the characterization of the metallic wires material. In this paper, the mechanical properties of three models with different relative density will be investigated under different preload masses and for three acceleration levels. A number of experiments can be examined by changing the direction of excitation in order to describe the compression and non-compression molding direction effect on the dynamic behavior. A modal analysis is performed using the rational fraction polynomial method to determine the stiffness and the damping ratio from the measured transmissibility data. According to the reported experimental results, the major factor affecting the mechanical characteristics (stiffness and damping) is the sliding friction that exists at the contact-points between wires.