Vibration Analysis of a Horizontal Washing Machine, Part IV: Optimal Damped Vibration Absorber

This is the 4th research paper investigating the vibration of a horizontal washing machine. In this paper a dynamic vibration absorber is attached to the machine drum. The dynamic system is modeled and the dynamic absorber is assumed to have a known mass and damping coefficient. Only the absorber stiffness is tuned using MATLAB optimization toolbox. The drum vibration velocity is used an objective function to attain a value compatible with ISO standard10816. The isolation efficiency is used as a functional constraint to succeed in isolating the large unbalanced rotating force of the laundry during the spinning cycle of the washing machine. The simulation results are amazing. The proposed approach can reduce the vibration velocity to less than 0.7 mm/s RMS and increase the isolation efficiency to greater than 99.7 %.