Nonviscously damped vibrating systems are characterized by dissipative mechanisms depending on the time history of the response velocity, introduced in the physical models using convolution integrals involving hereditary kernel functions. One of the most used damping viscoelastic models is Biot’s model, whose hereditary functions are assumed to be exponential kernels. The free-motion equations of these types of nonviscous systems lead to a nonlinear eigenvalue problem enclosing certain number of the so-called nonviscous modes with nonoscillatory nature. Traditionally, the nonviscous modes (eigenvalues and eigenvectors) for nonproportional systems have been computed using the state-space approach, computationally expensive. This number of real eigenvalues is directly related to the rank of the damping matrices associated with the exponential kernels. The state-space approach has traditionally been used up to now as the only method to compute the nonviscous modes for nonproportionally damped systems. Motivated by this open problem, we propose in this chapter to describe the available numerical methods for classically damped systems and present the recent methods for nonclassically damped systems. It is shown that the problem of finding the nonviscous modes can be reduced to solve as a set of linear eigenvalue problems. The presented methods are compared through a numerical example.
Part of the book: Viscoelastic and Viscoplastic Materials