For application in damping treatments, elastomeric materials should have a high damping loss factor, but this is inevitably linked to a strong temperature-dependence of the dynamic properties. A methodology is developed that allows a material to be formulated for a particular damping application where temperature-dependence has to be taken into account. The methodology is applied to the case of a tuned absorber system used for damping the vibration of a railway track. This is required to be effective over a temperature range -20°C to 40°C. To investigate the effect of the temperature on the performance of a rail damper, a simple Timoshenko beam model of the track vibration is used, to which are added single-frequency and dual-frequency tuned absorbers. The results show that a high noise reduction can be achieved for the optimum stiffness, provided that the loss factor is between about 0.25 and 0.4. In order to study the generic effects of high damping versus constant stiffness, the time-temperature superposition principle is used to convert frequency-dependence to temperature-dependence for a notional material with constant loss factor. This is used in the prediction of decay rates and thereby noise reduction. In addition, a weighted noise reduction is studied by using measured rail temperature distributions. This temperatureweighted noise reduction allows a single number measure of performance to be obtained which can be used to assess various elastomeric materials in order to determine the optimum material for a given situation. Two types of viscoelastic material, butyl and EPDM rubbers with various amount of fillers and plasticisers are investigated. The properties of both rubbers have been measured over the range of temperatures for frequencies 300-3000 Hz. For this a test rig had to be modified. For butyl, the best combination of filler and plasticiser gives temperature weighted noise reductions up to 5.9 dB(A). Butyl rubber is suitable for use in the rail absorber giving high noise reductions between 0°C and 40°C. The best EPDM compound gives a temperature-weighted noise reduction up to 6.2 dB(A). Comparing these two rubbers, EPDM is more suitable for low temperatures below 10°C and butyl is more suitable for higher temperatures above 10°C.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:494718 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Ahmad, Nazirah |
| Contributors | Thompson, David |
| Publisher | University of Southampton |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/66183/ |
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