This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will explore a new concept in passive vibration absorbing material. If successful, the resulting new material will have vastly superior performance over a broader range of frequencies for sound absorption, vibration isolation, and impact isolation than currently available materials. Previous work has yielded a new sound and vibration absorbing material with several valuable properties including significant attenuation at frequencies as low as 30 Hertz. That work has lead to an understanding of how to build better materials for noise, vibration, and shock attenuation. The new material to be developed in this research will be passive, light, highly reliable, and can be produced at low cost. Another benefit of the material is that the mechanism by which attenuation occurs is six degree of freedom. Applications include isolation of delicate equipment from vibrations of the structure to which they are mounted, vibration isolation for high precision machine tools, lithography machines, scanning probe microscopes, and similar equipment. It will also be usable as a new generation of vibration dampers on equipment such as automotive vehicles and aircraft.
