The analysis of arbitrarily-damped linear mechanical systems (Q1977064)

The paper treats arbitrarily damped linear mechanical systems, with the emphasis on the analysis of non-decoupled systems. It is well known that decoupled systems occur when the damping matrix is a linear combination of mass and stiffness matrices. Systems with this type of damping are said to have proportional damping, which seldom occurs in practice, but nevertheless many damped systems are analyzed under this assumption. The authors propose an algorithm to determine natural frequencies, damped frequencies, and damping ratios of \(n\)-degree-of-freedom damped systems, that does not require the casting of the system description into first-order form.