High Cycle Fatigue Solutions

Damaging vibration can cause high cycle fatigue, resulting in premature wear and product failure. DTI’s application-specific solutions for vibration control protect structural integrity and prolong product life.

Analytical +
Experimental Verification

We use advanced predictive analytics and verify our designs through experimental testing to ensure optimal performance.

Proven
Performance

Our products have a 30-year track record of reducing cracks, damage, and premature wear caused by resonance response.

Verifiable
Cost Savings

Our damping systems prevent premature structural failure and reduce excessive wear on vital components and instruments.

Damping & Isolation Systems

DTI’s proprietary Stand-Off Damping Systems provide extremely high levels of damping performance while being weight-efficient and easy to install. Our systems suppress noise, vibrations, and high-cycle fatigue damage due to resonance response. They deliver superior levels of structural damping – especially relative to temperature – with minimal weight addition.

Common applications include aircraft fuselage skin, aerospace structures, marine hulls, and heavy off-road equipment.

DTI’s Constrained Layer Damping Systems vary from relatively simple designs for consumer appliances to multi-material designs for extended operating temperature ranges to very complex, lightweight designs for aerospace applications. Regardless of the application, our Constrained Layer Damping Systems are flexible, meet flammability and outgassing requirements, and can utilize a wide variety of materials –  including steel, aluminum, titanium, and carbon fiber composites.

DTI’s unique Damping Links are extremely effective for attenuation of a resonance response.  Our design and analysis approach allows us to locate the links according to the modal displacement of the structure in order to induce the strain into the viscoelastic material and not the structure.

DTI’s Tuned Vibration Absorbers are a cost-effective solution for situations when a noise or forced vibration issue occurs for a single frequency.  While TVAs have been used for many years in noise and vibration applications, there are performance limitations and high upkeep costs associated with this approach.  DTI has solved these problems.  Our proprietary TVAs are designed to stay “tuned” across a wide range of operating conditions and harsh environments, eliminating costly downtime and maintenance required to individually tune each TVA by hand.

DTI’s De-Coupled Mass Acoustic Barrier system consists of a mass layer that is decoupled from the base structure with a compliant spacer layer. The resultant solution creates a double-walled effect which improves performance at mid-to-high frequencies without a significant mass addition.  The system performs better at high frequencies than a single-walled system of the same mass.  Our Decoupled Mass Acoustic Barrier system provides a lightweight solution to significantly attenuate high frequency acoustic energy.

CASE STUDY: SATELLITE BALCONY STRUCTURE

The customer contacted DTI regarding a resonance-related vibration issue jeopardizing two sensitive instruments mounted to the satellite balcony structure.  Excitation from launch loads excites resonances of the balcony structure resulting in excessive vibration of the instruments.  Examination of the mode shapes associated with two particular resonances indicated that the instruments were mounted at locations of maximum deflection for those resonances.

A key factor in the passive damping system design is that the most active area of the structure (for the resonance response) are stay-out zones.   Therefore, DTI was forced to attenuate the resonance response via application of a passive damping system to non-optimal locations on the structure.  Careful and thorough analysis was performed to minimize added weight via FEA.

The issue is a launch concern at approximately (+72 F).

Since no hardware was available until the final tests carried out on the actual structure, DTI initially created a representative panel test article and demonstrated the accuracy of DTI FEA model methodologies (for prediction of damping performance) on that test article.  Having verified the design tools (via correlation between FEA model and experimental measurements) with and without the passive damping system, DTI utilized the FEA design tools along with our library of VEMs to design the passive damping system countermeasure.

Considerable work was done with respect to minimizing area coverage and weigth.  Note that the optimum damping system application sites were stay-out zones. Base structure was (2”) thickness aluminum honeycomb composite with aluminum facing sheets.

A high-performance DTI Stand-Off Damping System was designed for the structure.   The SODS was optimized for attenuation of two key resonances below 200 Hz.

The SODS delivered about a factor of (5.0) reduction in response for the resonances of interest.

DTI obtained very good correlation between FEA model output and experimental measurements acquired on the actual structure (with and without the damping system applied).

Success of the project relied on DTI VEM dynamic mechanical properties and DTI FEA modeling methodologies, since no prototype hardware was available.