Criteria for Comparing the Effectiveness of Damping Treatments

Criteria have been deduced indicating the effectiveness of a damping treatment in attenuating bending stresses, accelerations, inertial forces and sound pressure transmitted associated with simple vibrating plates under harmonic and random excitation. Coincidence sound transmission through plates is also considered. The importance is emphasized of including in these criteria the factors by which the damping treatment increases the mass and stiffness of the system. Three different commercial treatments have been compared using some of the criteria and it has been shown that the treatment providing the highest loss factor increment to the system is not necessarily the most effective ining all the response quantities.