Title

Quantification of Damping in a SDOF System

Author(s)
Course and
Section number
Submission Date

G.P. Burdell
ME 3057-Section A0
08/22/2016

Example Short Lab Report for ME 3057

August 22, 2016

Introduction

MotivationIn order to design a system properly and to predict its resulting behavior, it is necessary to
Plan

quantify the systems dynamic properties, particularly damping. The goal of this experiment was
to characterize damping in a single degree-of-freedom (SDOF) oscillator. In this project, the free
vibration response to an impulse excitation was measured in a simple structural system, and the
log-decrement technique was used to obtain the damping ratio by quantifying the exponential
decay.
In order to obtain a SDOF systems damping ratio, the systems free vibration response must be
measured. The free response describes a systems behavior after it receives a short duration
impulse. The systems response is governed by its intrinsic system properties; an SDOF system
oscillates at the damped natural frequency, d, while the rate at which the response decays is
dictated by the systems damping ratio, . By m easuring t he f ree r esponse, d and ca n be
obtained. Background
Procedure

Instrumentation

Figure 1 is a diagram of the experimental apparatus. The beam of a Laser Doppler Vibrometer
(LDV) was focused on the free end of a fixed-free beam; output from the LDV was delivered to a
National Instruments (NI) myRIO data acquisition system, which processed and displayed the
output. The myRIO was integrated with a personal computer (PC) running a LabVIEW virtual
instrument (VI). Figure 2 is a screenshot of the LabVIEW user interface, showing the data
collection settings, and Figure 3 is a block diagram of the LabVIEW VI. The VI used a timed loop
and 1 KHz clock to sample the data; a sampling frequency was selected to avoid aliasing. When
properly sampled data was obtained, it was then processed using the log-decrement technique to
obtain the systems damping ratio. The LDV and myRIO provide a voltage value that is
proportional to the beams velocity; while though the true displacement is not known, the ratio of
the peaks is of interest in this experiment. Thus, the LDV measurement is sufficient for the
purposes of this experiment.

Assumptions

The beam has a distributed mass, and can thus have infinite natural frequencies. It was
approximated as an SDOF system by focusing the data collection on the frequency range
encompassing only the first natural frequency. To collect data, a tap from a screwdriver was used
to impose an impulse at the end of the beam, and the resulting the free response signals were
recorded.
Figures are 1) Cited, 2) Defined, 3) Discussed
Results and Discussion

beams entire response signal,3)

showing that the impulse was imparted to
1)Figure 4 displays the 2)

the beam at roughly the one second point and that at the three second point the signal had largely
dissipated and the beam had ceased to vibrate. Figure 5 shows a portion of that response signal.
Qualitatively, Figures 4 and 5 show a typical pattern of oscillatory decay, demonstrating that the
system is underdamped, meaning the system has a damping ratio between zero and one. While the
frequency was not measured, the systems response appears qualitatively to occur with a fixed
frequency, which is consistent with the stated assumption that the beam could be reasonably
2

3) Discussion with points

Example Short Lab Report for ME 3057

August 22, 2016

approximated as a SDOF system. Additionally, the peaks in the response appear qualitatively to
follow an exponential decay rather than a linear decay; this means that, consistent with the fixedfree setup of the beam, the damping in the system is likely to be structural rather than frictional.
To quantify system damping, the measured data must be analyzed. For an underdamped system
such as this one, with small viscous or structural damping, the log decrement can be obtained as
the natural log of the ratio of successive peaks in the systems time response. This is expressed as
Equation 1.
()

= log (+)

(1)

where n is the number of consecutive peaks considered, x(t) is the amplitude of the first peak
at time t, and x(t+nt) is the amplitude of the nth peak, at time t+nt, where t is the response period.
Using the log decrement value obtained with Equation 1, it is possible to calculate the systems
damping ratio according to Equation 2.

Discussion of a result often

sets up the next result

1+2

(2)

The LDV and myRIO systems automatically perform this calculation, and the output of this
system is adequate for this project.
Analysis of the systems response is restricted to the selection shown in Figure 5 in order to
avoid errors such as overdriving (clipping of the response), contamination associated with the
impulse itself, and a small influence from higher natural frequencies. The peaks in the response,
were determined using MATLABs findpeaks function; the MATLAB code is displayed in the
appendix. These peaks are plotted in Figure 6 and provided in tabular form in Table 1. The number
of peaks in the considered portion of the response is 29; applying the log decrement method from
Equations 1 and 2 yields a damping ratio of 0.01.
Conclusions
The log decrement method was used to obtain the damping ratio of a simple SDOF structural
system. The damping ratio was found to be 0.01, which is consistent with the observation that
damping in simple structural systems is often small. The system damping is considered to arise
from a combination of effects, such as viscous damping from the air, structural hysteretic damping
in the beam, and damping provided by an imperfect clamp. Summary, followed by....
The system provides experimental error in several forms. First, the log decrement method
requires the magnitudes of the peaks in the oscillatory decay; if the sampling frequency is
insufficient, the peak magnitudes will not be accurately measured, causing the log decrement, and
therefore the damping ratio, to contain finite error. Additionally, external excitations, such as
vibration induced by the HVAC system, may have introduced vibration during testing. To reduce
these errors and improve the calculation of , multiple trials of the experiment should be performed
and the log decrements should be averaged.
Takeaway points
3

Appendix

Displays are presented

in numerical order

Figure 1: Experimental apparatus

User control of
sampling freq.

User control of
experiment time

Graphical display of systems

vibration

Figure 2: LabVIEW user interface (i.e., front panel) highlighting important attributes
4

1 KHz time loop

Read response from

LDV

Figure 3: LabVIEW VI block diagram, highlighting specific attributes of the code

All displays are cited and discussed in the report text

4
3

Response (V)

2
1
0
1
2
3
4

Time (s)

Figure 4: Entire response of beam to initial impulse excitation

5

3
2

Response (V)

1
0
1
2
3

0.1

0.2

0.3

0.4

0.5

0.6

0.7

Time (s)
Figure 5: Sample portion of oscillatory decay used to measure log decrement

Response
Peaks

Response (V)

2
1
0
1
2
3

0.1

0.2

0.3

0.4

0.5

0.6

0.7

Time (s)

Figure 6: Oscillatory decay showing peaks used to measure log decrement

6

Reduced Data:

Table 1: Amplitude peaks used to calculate log decrement

MATLAB Code:
% Read the response from a saved 'xlsx' Excel worksheet
Data = xlsread('Log_Decrement_Test.xlsx');
t = Data(:,1);
% Time (s)
X = Data(:,2);
% Response (V)
% Plot entire response
figure(1)
plot(t, X, 'b', 'linewidth', 2)
xlabel('Time (s)', 'fontsize', 14, 'fontname', 'times')
ylabel('Response (V)', 'fontsize', 14, 'fontname', 'times')
set(gca, 'fontsize', 14, 'fontname', 'MaplePI')
grid on
% Section off the portion of no response and the impulse, in addition to
% any possible overdriving
tStart = 1.266;
I_Start = tStart/(t(2) - t(1)); % Index of start point (since dt is
constant!)
% Section off the end of the response, where the amplitude decays to a very
% small value
tEnd = 2.043;
I_End = tEnd/(t(2) - t(1));
% Extract only the desired middle portion of the data
t = Data(I_Start:I_End,1) - Data(I_Start,1);
X = Data(I_Start:I_End,2);
% find the peaks and their locations, and avoid any possible peaks that are
% less than zero
[pks, locs] = findpeaks(X, 'MINPEAKHEIGHT', 0);
n = length(pks);
Pk1 = pks(1);
Pkn = pks(end);
Pk
% Determine log decrement and damping ratio
delta = 1/n*log(Pk1/Pkn);
zeta = 1/sqrt(1 + (2*pi/delta)^2)
% Plot the middle portion, with the peaks
figure(2)
plot(t, X, 'b', 'linewidth', 2); hold on;
plot(t(locs), pks, 'ro', 'markeredgecolor', 'k', 'markerfacecolor', 'r');
hold off;
xlabel('Time (s)', 'fontsize', 14, 'fontname', 'times')
ylabel('Response (V)', 'fontsize', 14, 'fontname', 'times')
set(gca, 'fontsize', 14, 'fontname', 'MaplePI', 'xlim', [0 max(t)])
ll = legend('Response', 'Peaks');
set(ll, 'fontsize', 14, 'fontname' , 'times')
grid on