The interior working mechanism and temperature characteristics of a fluid based micro-vibration isolator

Micro-vibration isolation is a hot topic in spacecraft vibration control, and fluid based vibration isolators alternatively provide a good and reliable solution to this challenging issue. In this paper, a novel fluid based micro-vibration isolator (FBMVI) is investigated. According to its inherent working principle and deformation pattern, the generation mechanisms of the damping and stiffness characteristics are derived, which are nonlinear functions of the environmental temperature. Then a lumped parameter model which is expressed by the physical design parameters (PDPs) is constructed, and the corresponding performance objective indices (POIs) are also obtained by applying the equivalence of mechanical impedance. Based on the finite element analysis of the internal damping component, a single variable method is further adopted to carry out the parametric study, and the influences of each PDP on the POIs are analyzed in details. Finally, experiments are conducted to identify the variation of fluid bulk modulus with the outside environmental temperature, and to validate the performance of the isolator under different temperature environments. The tested results show great consistence compared with the predicted tendencies of the parametric study. The results of this study can provide a very useful insight into and/or an important guidance for the design and application of this type of FBMVIs in engineering practice.