The subject of this investigation is the method of calculating material damping of a cantilever beam. Damping is the mechanism by which the vibrational energy is gradually converted into heat or sound. The loss factor, otherwise known as the damping factor, is part of the global properties of a structure which can be identified from its frequency response measurements. Experimental frequency response measurements require three main components: a source of excitation, sensors, and analyzer. It is the objective of this thesis to investigate the effect of different types of exciters and sensors on the frequency response measurement of the cantilever beam and consequently on the loss factor estimate of the cantilever beam. Two sources of excitations and four types of sensors are considered. Discussion of the results, comments and recommendations about the different techniques are presented
