Research of a New Controllable Friction Damper and Its Application on the Gas Compressor’s Vibration Control

The new controllable friction dampers were composed of a housing, a piston, rollers and elastic bodies. The housing was set on the platform under the machineries or sub structures with which the piston was connected. The housing and the piston could move relatively when the machinery or the sub-structure vibrating under the inside or outside loads. The friction pairs, which were composed of the housing and rollers’ contact surfaces, could dissipate the vibration energy by the Coulomb force. The dampers could increase the output forces automatically with the augmentation of the relative vibration displacements by the usage of their interior elastic bodies which can enhance the positive pressure on the friction pairs. The new dampers overcame the shortcomings of the traditional frictional dampers that could only export the invariable force after their assembling. So they had great capabilities to consume more vibration energy. At the same time, the dampers could use the vibration source signal to control their output forces. This merit could increase the sensitiveness of the dampers to control minor vibration and expand the frequencies’ bound of the vibration sources that to be controlled. The simulation using the finite element program proved that the average displacement decrement of the gas compressor that used the new dampers to control their vibration reduced upwards of 67.2% than the machinery that didn’t use dampers. The new dampers have the better vibration control performance.