Complex Modal Analysis of a Non-Modally Damped Continuous Beam

This work represents an investigation of the complex modes of continuous vibration systems with nonmodal damping. As an example, a cantilevered beam with damping at the free end is studied. Traditional separation of variables for this problem leads to a differential eigenvalue problem which requires a numerical solution. In this paper, assumed modes are applied to discretize the eigenvalue problem in state-variable form, to then obtain estimates of the frequencies and modes. The finite-element method (FEM) is also utilized to get the mass, stiffness, and damping matrices and further to solve a state-variable eigenproblem. A comparison between the assumed-mode and finite-element eigenvalues and modal vectors shows that the methods produce consistent results. The comparison of the modes was done visually and also by using the modal assurance criterion (MAC) on the modal vectors. The assumed-mode method is then used to study the effects of the damping coefficient on mode shapes and modal damping.