Effects of Boundary Damping on Natural Frequencies in Bending Vibrations of Intelligent Vibrissa Tactile Systems

This paper is devoted to the analytical investigations of transversal vibrations of beams, which exhibit discrete, viscoelastic, rotational and translational supports. The special structure of the beam models is caused by the consideration of animal vibrissae. Vibrissae are tactile hairs (of a tactile sense organ), which complement the audible and visual sense. There exist different types of these tactile hairs, where we do not want to distinguish the various types, because the tenor of our investigations is from biomimetics and bionics. Rather, we are interested in the special design of a vibrissa from the mechanical point of view. In contrast to many works from literature, which focus on (quasi-) static bending investigations, we try to investigate and to determine the effects of the special design of a vibrissa (e.g., viscoelastic supports due to the follicle sine complex and due to the skin) on the dynamic behavior, especially on the spectrum of (natural) frequencies. The knowledge of dynamical characteristics is important for the design of artificial sensors. We present various beams with different supports (clamped and pivoted with discrete viscoelastic couplings), which are to model the biological tissues. This is new in literature and is different from existing researches. We focus on investigations of the natural frequency spectra of various systems. A close examination of vibrissa-like beam models with boundary damping exhibits features that are unlike in comparison to classical vibration systems. Keywords–Bending beam vibrations; boundary damping; natural frequency; bio-inspired sensor; vibrissa.