The Role of Damping in Complex Structural Dynamics: Data-Driven Approaches

The Dynamics Group at Hamburg University of Technology has been working on two consecutive research projects supervised by Prof. Norbert Hoffmann within the Priority Programme SPP 1897. The first project ‘Understanding and improving energy dissipation and damping in structures subject to self-excited irregular vibrations’ focused on the chaotic nature of friction-excited dynamics and how properties of those complex vibrations can be leveraged for understanding damping and stability. Within the second project ’Understanding and improving energy dissipation and vibration damping in structures subject to self-excited irregular vibrations - linking data driven approaches with modelling’, data-driven techniques were linked with conventional modeling approaches to arrive at hybrid simulation and identification approaches for damping in complex structural dynamics. The work at hand summarizes central findings and novel approaches that have been published in a number of peer-reviewed journal articles, poses new research questions, and gives an outlook.