Predicting the damping characteristics of vibration dampers employing generalized shear thickening fluids

Recently, the increasing vibration isolation demands drove the interest of viscous damper development towards employing non-Newtonian fluids that allow tailoring of highly customized damper characteristics. Several attempts have been made for using shear-thickening fluids; however, most of these studies measured only the final, resulting damping characteristic for a particular fluid rheology. This paper aims to give an analytical technique to predict the damping characteristic in the case of arbitrary fluid rheology for piston-type damper geometries with either an annular gap or circular hole(s) as restriction elements. The flow is approximated by laminar Poiseuille flow, and the governing equations are solved for arbitrary rheology. We present several force-velocity example characteristics for general rheologies, compare the analytical estimations against CFD computations, and provide a sample computation for nonlinear damper design.