Vibration modeling of structural fuzzy with continuous boundary

From experiments it is well known that the vibration response of a main structure with many attached substructures often shows more damping than structural losses in the components can account for. In practice, these substructures, which are not attached in an entirely rigid manner, behave like a multitude of different sprung masses each strongly resisting any motion of the main structure (master) at their base antiresonance.

The “theory of structural fuzzy” is intended for modeling such high damping. In the present article the theory of fuzzy structures is briefly outlined and a method of modeling fuzzy substructures examined. This is done by new derivations and physical interpretations are provided. Further, the method is extended and simplified by introducing a simple deterministic approach to determine the boundary impedance of the structural fuzzy.

By using this new approach, the damping effect of the fuzzy with spatial memory is demonstrated by numerical simulations of a main beam structure with fuzzy attachments. It is shown that the introduction of spatial memory reduces the damping effect of the fuzzy and in certain cases the damping effect may even be eliminated completely.