An Efficient Approximation for Optimal Damping in Mechanical Systems

Abstract

This paper is concerned with an efficient algorithm for damping optimization in mechanical systems with a prescribed structure. Our approach is based on the minimization of the total energy of the system which is equivalent to the minimization of the trace of the corresponding Lyapunov equation. Thus, the prescribed structure in our case means that a mechanical system is close to a modally damped system. Although our approach is very efficient (as expected) for mechanical systems close to modally damped system, our experiments show that for some cases when systems are not modally damped, the proposed approach provides efficient approximation of optimal damping.