Vibration properties of most assembled mechanical systems depend on frictional damping in joints. The nonlinear transfer behavior of the frictional interfaces often provides the dominant damping mechanism in structure and plays an important role in the vibratory response of it. For improving the performance of systems, many studies have been carried out to predict measure and enhance the energy dissipation of friction. This paper presents a new approach to vibration reduction of flexible spacecraft with enhancing the energy dissipation of frictional dampers. Spacecraft is modeled as a 3 degree of freedom mass-spring system which is controlled by a lead compensator and System responses to step function evaluated. Coulomb and Jenkins element has been used as vibration suppression mechanisms in joints and sensitivity of their performance to variations of spacecraft excitation amplitude and damper properties is analyzed. The relation between frictional force and displacement derived and used in optimization of control performance. Responses of system and control effort needed for the vibration control are compared for these two frictional joints. It is shown that attitude control effort reduces, significantly with coulomb dampers and response of system improves. On the other hand, due to stick-slip phenomena in Jenkins element, we couldn’t expect the same performance from Jenkins damper.
