Rubber as Antivibration Material
Abstract The idea of using rubber as a material for the damping and insulation of mechanical vibrations is not new. That this application of rubber has had no great scope up to now can be ascribed to a combination of circumstances: on the one hand there are unlimited varieties of rubber, concerning which rubber manufacturers publish no technical data, which can be relied on for specific projects; on the other hand there is a lack of knowledge of the behavior of rubber by builders themselves. In these circumstances it seemed desirable that the Rubber Foundation should endeavor to assist builders in this respect, and to this end a basic research into the vibration characteristics of rubber has been carried out. We shall report here on several points resulting from this investigation. Moreover we shall also discuss what can be expected of rubber, how it can be most economically used, and what advantages it shows over other materials. Rubber at the present time is unjustly considered an untechnical material, yet of late the rubber industry has made enormous advances. Types of rubber of different hardnesses can be made which for practical purposes are ideally elastic, since they are in no way plastic, and their durability is so great that a piece a few centimeters thick has almost an unlimited length of life, for example, ten to twenty years, without any appreciable change in properties. The generally feared aging symptoms in rubber for technical applications are now of secondary importance. These are actually not more than a surface oxidation which can injure thin rubber articles of poor quality in a comparatively short time, but has no influence on thicker articles. However, this does not mean that adequate attention should not be given to this question. For such a purpose one must use a superior type of rubber, from the best material, vulcanized by an expert.