Lightweight construction is becoming increasingly important nowadays with the ongoing effort to increase efficiency, save resources, reduce energy consumption, and lower greenhouse gas emissions. In this study we investigated materials that are suitable to construct damping elements which damp vibrations through friction. Such a damping element could for example be a bolted joint which might be used to replace a very heavy tuned mass damper and will therefore save weight.

Suitable materials for use as damping elements need to maximize energy dissipation while minimizing wear. To assess the suitability of different material combinations in terms of damping and wear resistance under fretting conditions, three material pairings were investigated in experiments. The tribological experiments are conducted on a fretting tester under "gross slip" conditions. The cumulated dissipated energy can be calculated from the test data. The wear volume is determined optically using white light interferometry. The so-called "energy wear approach" is used to relate the wear volume to the cumulated dissipated energy. Three different alloys (nickel alloy, aluminium alloy, and brass alloy) are compared. The counter body was steel or a self-paring.

The experimental data are used to establish a constitutive material model that can be implemented into a finite element environment to represent the damping properties. The vibration response of a system is fundamentally dependent on the mass, stiffness and damping of the system itself. The reduction in mass and stiffness of the system is counteracted by increasing damping through friction in bolted joints in this project. The difficulty in a real bolted joint is to allow low contact pressures while keeping the setting behaviour of the bolt low. For this purpose, FEM simulations are used to consider the behaviour of the structure already during the development process. The models are validated with experiments.