Study on Vibration Attenuation Element Using Damping Polyurethane Gel Material

The seismic safety should be constantly considered for mechanical, architectural and civil structures in Japan where is one of severe quake-prone countries in the world. The aseismic construction, seismically isolated structure and response control structure have been applied to the several structures for upgrading of seismic safety, and then the design technique for large scale structure in the current situation is close to standard range in recent years. However, the quake-proof technique for the smaller scale structure such as a detached house, server rack and art and craft has not yet been in the development stage until now, and especially there is a problem in the damping element in the practical use stage because the downsizing of damping element is often difficult to be adapted to design specification such as a performance, a cost, a mechanism and so on for comparatively small structure. In this study, the urethane material has been developed to use as a damping element in the response control device. The newly urethane gel material is compounded to become the characteristic that a spring element in the material to minimize the effect against the structural rigidity. This paper describes the efficiency of newly developed urethane gel material as a damping element is considered from several material characteristic evaluations and basic mechanical characteristic investigations.