Friction damping is common in engineering structures for the purpose of energy dissipation and vibration control. Examples of applications are bolted connections and earthquake isolation systems. However, there is a shortage of works that investigate the effects of different contact materials on the energy dissipation performance and friction behaviour of friction dampers, which is valuable knowledge for design optimization.

This thesis uses a numerical approach to explore the time response and energy dissipated by friction of the harmonically excited SDOF (single-degree-of-freedom) system with Coulomb friction contact between the sliding mass and a fixed wall. In addition, for the same SDOF system, an experimental investigation of the friction damping performance in terms of friction behaviour and energy dissipation is carried out for (1) steel, (2) rubber and (3) aramid contact
materials. The aim is to get a better understanding of how different contact materials affect the performance of friction dampers. Various time scales, excitation frequencies and friction forces are considered.

The main findings of this research are: (1) the characterization of the friction behaviour of steel-to-steel, rubber-to-steel and aramid-to-steel contacts; (2) the comparative analysis of the energy dissipation performance of the different contact materials; (3) the assessment of the long-term performance of the different contacts; (4) the comparison between numerical results based on the Coulomb friction model and experimental results. The tests have shown that rubber has the highest energy dissipation capacity and fairly unstable behaviour, steel has the second highest energy dissipation and irregular behaviour and aramid has the lowest energy dissipation performance and very consistent behaviour. Finally, the application of a method that calculates the energy dissipation of friction damping based on direct experimental outputs is an important contribution to the field regarding experimental investigations.