Abstract
A variety of off-highway vehicles are subject to significant steering wheel vibrations during operation. Typical examples of such machines are vibratory asphalt and soil compactors. Large compacting forces, while essential for the proper compacting operation, will inevitably cause undesired effects such as severe vibrations of steering wheels. Traditional vibration control measures are often found either impractical or less effective in reducing the level of hand vibrations which is considered an important quality and safety issue in compacter design and sales. In this paper, an advanced concept of reducing hand vibrations is presented in the context of Multi-degree-of-freedom Tuned Dynamic Absorbers (MTDA). The MTDA essentially represents an assembly of simple dynamic absorbers individually tuned to different targeted vibration modes in different degree of freedoms. While the design concept and associated parameters are numerically determined by FEA, the prototype is fine tuned to the desired vibration modes through a bench test. The effectiveness of the MTDA is experimentally verified in-situ through a sequence of tests which are carefully designed to adequately reflect its performance under field conditions.
