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13

SOFTWARE

Christoph Weidemann
INTEC GmbH

SIMPACK Tips & Tricks


Understanding Damping
The meaning and importance of damp- ing from a separate viscous damper,
ing is not so obvious as it is for masses, then the material damping can often
stiffness or friction coefficients. How- be neglected.
ever, model behaviour and even in-
tegration stability may be severely Most systems are more complicated
influenced by damping. This article ex- than a simple one-mass oscillator but,
plains the basics for the most common the rough estimation often ap-
application cases. plies even in these cases. The masses
connected by the spring must be com-
Why is Damping so Important? bined by adding their inverted values:
1/meff = 1/m1 + 1/m2 (Fig. 1). However, Fig 1: One- and two-mass
SIMPACK Force Elements usually re- the easiest method for larger models oscillators
quire a "damping constant", d, in the with many masses is to check and ad-
unit Ns/m or Nms/rad, or a correspond- just the different natural dampings
ing damping-velocity characteristic with the help of an eigenvalue analysis.
given by an Input Function. These can
easily be determined if a viscous damp- Damping in Contact Situations
er, etc. is to be simulated. However, in
situations where this value is not given, The aforementioned method is also
it will not suffice to simply ignore the valid for contacts like in bumpstops or
damping. Usually, a missing or too low gearwheel teeth (Fig. 3) but, three spe-
damping causes far too long integra- cial points must be considered here:
tion times whilst a too large damping
hides important oscillations or yields 1) The damping must be applied only
huge forces or torques. It is important when the two bodies are in contact
to note that SIMPACKs SODASRT inte- this is ensured by, e.g., Force Element
grators do not superimpose a notice- (FE) 018 or FE 005 with clearance func-
able "artificial" numerical damping. tionality, but not when a simple bump-
Systems without explicit damping will stop spring characteristic is used in
actually appear undamped in the simu- FE 005. Fig. 2: Relations between damping
lation. constant d and natural damping
2) When the contact is being released, D (translation and rotation). If the
What If the Damping is Unknown? the damping force must not exceed loss angle is given the damping
the remaining elastic force, in order depends on the frequency f
There is a simple but effective method to avoid "sticking". FE 018 has the op-
to estimate an appropriate damping tion to switch the damping off during
coefficient. Just consider the system the expansion (parameter 7), the gear
as a one-mass oscillator (see Fig. 1). pair FE 225 allows a smaller damping
If mass and stiffness are not explicitly constant to be used for the expansion
given or not constant, then character- phase about 5075% of the "stand-
istic "effective" values must be used ard" compression damping is recom-
instead. mended.

The estimation formulas are given 3) When contact Force Elements are
in Fig. 2. With stiffness c and mass m used without Root Functions then the
known, the damping constant d can sudden switching of the damping force
be derived from the natural damping at the moment of contact may cause
D, which is usually given in percent. integrator convergence problems that
Typical values for D are 2% if the elas- lead to long calculation times and
tic material is steel, or 25% in case of "peaks" in the results. The damping
elastomer. So, for example, a helical transition feature of element FE 018 Fig. 3: Bumpstop contact with
steel spring that suspends an effective and others removes this drawback by interpenetration p and different
mass of 10 000 kg with a stiffness of slowly increasing the damping along dampings for compression and
106 N/m would require a damping con- with the interpenetration. A recom- expansion
stant of about 4 000 Ns/m. However, mended transition depth is about 1/10
if there is sufficient additional damp- of the typical interpenetration values.

SIMPACKNews, Publication June 2009

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