Vibration Control Solutions

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 remedied 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.

The customer contacted DTI regarding attenuation of resonance response of satellite structure near 120 Hz. Exposure to launch vehicle excitation and subsequent resonance response near 120 Hz jeopardized sensitive instruments aboard the satellite. Countermeasure installation sites were very limited, due to the large amount of instrumentation mounted to the the structure.

DTI configured an FEA model of the satellite structure and correlated model predictions to existing experimental data. Using the FEA model, DTI designed a pair of Tuned Mass Dampers (TMDs) countermeasures and determined best/viable installation sites. TMD mass was optimized using the FEA tool.

Viscoelastic material utilized in the TMD design was selected based on stable modulus vs. temperature performance (to maintain tuning frequency) and excellent outgas characteristics. An elevated temperature post-cure of the processed VEM enhanced outgas performance.

Significant effort was expended in design of the TMD mounting bracket. The TMD masses were constructed of tungsten carbide to minimize volume. Nevertheless, the TMD masses were required to hang out beyond the satellite framework, as this was the only available space for them. A challenge associated with the TMD mounting bracket was that it be kept low-mass as possible, but have adequate stiffness to transfer TMD dynamic actuation forces to the satellite framework structure (at the proper location). More effort went into the TMD mounting bracket design than into the TMD countermeasure concept itself.

Application of the TMDs resulted in substantial reduction in resonance response of the structure for 120 Hz.