Experimental Investigation of Randomly Oriented Wire Mesh Damper Performance

Wire mesh dampers can provide excellent damping for extreme environments and structures that repeatedly experience large vibrations. As a subset of friction damping, the fundamental technology has been explored through extensive material and empirical testing. Compared to more traditional friction dampers, however, the performance of wire mesh dampers remains relatively unexplored, both empirically and analytically. Limited studies address meshes aligned in very specific, repeating arrangements; this paper seeks to characterize performance for randomly oriented wire meshes. This paper explores the damping behavior across the parameter space of several mesh dampers, varying mesh parameters like wire diameter, mesh density, and compression force. Specific properties include the mesh effective stiffness and damping performance, measured across several compression set curves. Experiments show that a mesh compressed against a plate structure adds significant damping to the structure, and higher compression levels increase both the added damping and added stiffness effects of the mesh. Randomly oriented wire meshes provide a potential avenue for further study and implementation in extreme environments.