2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This paper documents our effort to improve learning experience for students in mechanical vibration class by designing and developing a teaching apparatus. In general, an undergraduate level vibration class covers various vibration phenomena including free vibrations and forced vibrations. Since the vibratory dynamic system generally consists of a mass, a spring, and a damper and its governing equation is a second order differential equation, most lecture contents are developed to provide the analytic analysis using challenging mathematical approaches. Even though this theoretic approach provides academic and practical advantages for students, many students struggle to achieve intuitive understanding on how real vibratory systems behave. It is even more challenging to connect the analysis results and the physical behaviors of vibration systems. To help these students, we designed and developed a teaching apparatus through a capstone design project in the department. In the one-year design project, a group of seniors designed a rotational vibratory system with springs and a torsional damper. Moment of inertia, stiffness and damping are all adjustable so the user can test various vibration conditions such as under-damping, over-damping, critical damping as well as forced vibrations. The system was also designed to be affordable. The apparatus was demonstrated in the class and was evaluated in a student survey. To promote the adoption of the proposed apparatus, the list of components is provided in this paper.