Lightweight designs are becoming increasingly important these days to reduce energy consumption and natural resources. However, a smaller weight typically causes a decrease in stiffness and non-negligible vibration amplitudes over a wide frequency range. One passive damping technique to reduce such vibrations is the use of particle dampers. Thereby containers attached to a vibrating structure or holes embedded in the vibrating structure are filled with granular material. Due to the structural vibrations, momentum is transferred to the granular material which interacts with each other. As a result, energy is dissipated by impacts and frictional phenomena between the particles. Recently, the rolling attribute of spheres has been used to design efficient particle dampers for low amplitude vibrations. As long as the container’s acceleration stays below the gravitational acceleration, this rolling effect can be used to damp horizontal vibrations efficiently. The description of the damper’s energy dissipation is accurately possible using analytical formulas which are presented here. In this presentation, the workflow for a systematic damper design is presented using the analytical formulas and validated experimentally . A good agreement between analytical and experimental measurements is achieved for an optimized damper, validating the presented approach
