A New Approach to Retrofitting an Existing Roller Door by Using Viscoelastic Materials for Vibration Reduction with Experimental Verification

Abstract

Roller doors are popularly used in cities due to their compact design, low cost, and ease of use. However, roller doors are made of thin metal sheets and have low inherent damping, which causes roller doors in their closed configuration to experience strong vibration when subjected to external excitations, such as wind and passing vehicles. These vibrations also result in severe noise radiation. It is therefore necessary and important to minimize the vibrations and the noise emanating from the roller doors. This research develops a novel application method to suppress the vibration of existing roller doors and to mitigate the induced noise, and the main principle is using the high damping property of viscoelastic materials through retrofit to increase the damping of the roller door. The key component of the retrofit is a viscoelastic stripe of three layers: a self-adhesive layer, a viscoelastic layer and a constraining metallic layer. The proposed method can be easily applied to the existing roller doors and has nearly no negative impact on its daily usage. To validate the feasibility of this method, shaking table tests were conducted and investigated on a roller door model with and without viscoelastic retrofit, and the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed retrofit method can effectively mitigate the vibration and therefore reduce the induced noise for an existing roller door.