Gas damping effect on thin vibrating gold plates: Experiments and modeling

Dynamic behavior of oscillating perforated gold plates under the effect of squeeze film damping is analyzed by means of experimental measurements and a compact model. Thin plates built with the surface micro-machining technique and gold electroplating were designed with many different geometrical dimensions for the plate and the holes; the number of holes is also variable. Altogether, samples with 28 square and 6 rectangular plate topologies were fabricated and measured. The quality factors of the fundamental oscillation modes have been extracted from the measurements through the half-power method and compared with a compact model of perforated dampers. The comparison results show that the gas damping model alone is not sufficient in modeling the damping in gold structures. One of the reasons is that the material damping of gold increases the measured damping coefficient.