Design of nonlinear rubber vibration isolators with low resonant frequency and high load bearing capacity

Designing a rubber vibration isolator to simultaneously meet the requirements on both low-frequency vibration isolation and high load carrying capacity has always been a major challenge. To tackle this problem, in this paper, a design strategy capable of effectively balancing these two effects to guide the design of such isolators is proposed. The rubber isolator static and dynamic behavior prediction models suitable for engineering applications are first established, where Yeoh model is adopted for rubber strong nonlinear feature prediction. Experiments are carried out to determine the material constants in Yeoh model and dynamic-to-static ratio of the rubber material. Combing with Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm, a design strategy is proposed. The conducted experiments demonstrate that based on the proposed numerical model and design procedure, rubber isolators with enough load bearing capability and low-frequency vibration isolation performance can be successfully designed.