Damping system, design approach

One ofthe essential characteristic of avehicle structural response in crash testing represents the crash pulse. The substance of the crash response depends on the mass, structural stiffriess, damping at the location of crash, and on interactions from neighboring components. The aim of crash pulse analysis consists in affecting vehicle structural design to decrease the risk of occupant injury. Two approaches are usually used to solve this task. In the first approach the crash pulse is assumed to be fixed and the restraint systems are designed to protect occupants subject to that pulse. 

Lever arms (Figure Ic) are proposed to increase the efficiency of damping devices by magnifying the inter-story drifts and drift velocities, transferred from the structure to dampers (Gluck, 1996). This idea was further developed for design of structures with optimal viscous dampers (Ribakov, 2000). The equivalent lever arm approach is used to change the effect of off the shelf linear viscous devices yielding an optimal passive control system. 

---