Effect of viscous damping on power transmissibility for the vibration isolation of building services equipment

Vibration isolation plays an important role in both the vibration and noise control of building services equipment. To evaluate vibration isolation performance, the force transmissibility method is commonly adopted. However, increasing the damping effect in the force transmissibility method reduces both the resonance peak value and the isolation performance in the “isolation region”. The limitation of the method is that the transmitted displacement of a floor structure and the interaction of mounting points are neglected. To include the floor displacement and the interaction of mounting points, Mak and Su recently proposed the power transmissibility method to assess the performance of vibration isolation. In this paper, the effect of viscous damping on power transmissibility is investigated. A practical procedure for experimentally determining the damping ratio is also given.