ME 415.1 Senior Design Project - Penn State University, State College PA
Project Title: Design and Development of an Interactive Vibration Absorber Experiment

   The concept of a vibration absorber is one that must be demonstrated or experienced to be understood. While the theory behind vibration absorbers is quite simple and taught in both ME54 and ME454, it is a phenomena that is not intuitively obvious. Students, especially the ones that think they understand vibrating systems, are usually shocked to learn that one can greatly reduce vibration of a base structure with a vibration absorber. Even when one demonstrates the concept theoretically, most are skeptical. It is just difficult to believe that the motion of a structure on which an oscillatory load is acting can be nearly eliminated by adding a substructure. Therefore a full-scale experimental prototype is needed to give students first-hand real world experience with vibration absorbers to reinforce their understanding of the underlying theory.