Design Guidelines for Additive Manufactured Particle Dampers: A Review

Recently, additive manufacturing has been used to integrate particle dampers into structural components, particularly by means of laser powder bed fusion (LPBF), in order to significantly reduce component vibrations. The advantage over previous damping mechanisms is that these can be functionally integrated directly into the component during the additive manufacturing process by leaving unmelted powder in the component. This allows local damping effects to be adjusted and low-vibration lightweight structures to be developed and manufactured. In addition, the damping properties act over a wide frequency range and are insensitive to temperature. Despite the positive damping properties, the use of laser beam melted particle dampers is limited at the present time, since there are not yet sufficient design tools available due to the numerous non-linear influences. This is where the current contribution comes in, by developing design guidelines for laser beam melted particle dampers. The results were finally summarised in a design catalogue and support a suitable design of laser beam melted particle dampers.