Abstract
Pneumatic vibration isolator typically consisting of dual-chamber pneumatic springs and a rigid table are widely employed for proper operation of precision instruments such as optical devices or nano-scale equipments owing to their low stiffness- and high damping-characteristics. As environmental vibration regulations for precision instruments become more stringent, it is required to improve further the isolation performance. In order to facilitate their design optimization or active control, a more accurate mathematical model or complex stiffness is needed. Experimental results we obtained rigorously for a dual-chamber pneumatic spring exhibit significantly amplitude dependent behavior, which cannot be described by linear models in earlier researches. In this paper, an improvement for the complex stiffness model is presented by taking two major considerations. One is to consider the amplitude dependent complex stiffness of diaphragm necessarily employed for prevention of air leakage. The other is to employ a nonlinear model for the air flow in capillary tube connecting the two pneumatic chambers. The proposed amplitude-dependent complex stiffness model which reflects dependency on both frequency and excitation amplitude is shown to be very valid by comparison with the experimental measurements. Such an accurate nonlinear model for the dual-chamber pneumatic springs would contribute to more effective design or control of vibration isolation systems.
