Energy Dissipation in Impact Absorber

Abstract

Impact absorbers are effective in passively absorbing and dissipating excessive energy in a primary system. They perform through momentum transfer by collision and dissipation of kinetic energy as sound and heat energy. The performance and dynamics of the impact absorber is highly dependent on the surface nature of the impact wall and ball. The impact surface material affects the effective coefficient of restitution. The objective of this research was to study and compare the total energy dissipation for different combinations of impact wall material and mass of impact ball. An experimental setup of single-unit impact absorber with different materials for the impact wall was designed and constructed. The exact locations of the impact ball(s) and the response of the primary structure were simultaneously tracked using a novel image processing technique. Based on the tracked motion of the ball and primary structure, two-way ANOVA is implemented to study the effect of variation in wall material and ball mass. It was shown that impact wall material selection is critical to obtain a best configuration for optimal total energy dissipation.

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