Objective  For passive shock isolators, Coulomb damping can be actively applied or passively present in the shock-isolation system, so it is necessary to analyze the law of function of Coulomb damping in the shock-isolation system.

  Methods  The shock isolation model with Coulomb damping was established to use the segmentation characteristic of Coulomb damping to express the system model, study the shock response of the Coulomb damping system under different input signals, and analyze the shock amplification characteristics of the system under different input pulse widths in this paper.

  Results  The simulation results show that the absolute acceleration response peak of the system under the action of half sinusoidal signal generally occurs at 1.75 times pulse width. When the input pulse width is greater than 0.265 times of the system period, the system loses the isolation performance and the system response enters the amplification area. Comparing the system response of half sine and trapezoidal waves under the condition of same peak and pulse width, the system response under the trapezoidal signal is larger and more sensitive to the change of trapezoidal wave signal pulse width.

  Conclusions  The study in this paper has certain guiding significance for the application of Coulomb damping in shock isolators.