dampening n : the act of making something slightly wet [syn: moistening]

Dampen \Damp"en\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Dampened; p. pr. & vb. n. Dampening.]
1. To make damp or moist; to make slightly wet.
2. To depress; to check; to make dull; to lessen. In a way that considerably dampened our enthusiasm. --The Century.

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In physics, damping is any effect that tends to reduce the amplitude of oscillations in an oscillatory system, particularly the harmonic oscillator.

In mechanics, friction is one such damping effect. For many purposes the frictional force Ff can be modeled as being proportional to the velocity v of the object:

where c is the viscous damping coefficient, given in units of Newton-seconds per meter.

Generally, damped harmonic oscillators satisfy the second-order differential equation:

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