The study presented herein describes promising designs of shell vibration isolators. The feature of the proposed designs is the cut thin-walled shell usage as the main bearing link. These resilient elements have high load capacity and, on the other hand, can provide the desired level of damping. From the point of view of mechanics, shell resilient elements are considered as the deformable systems with dry friction. When simulating these systems, structurally nonlinear non-conservative mixed contact issues of cut shell – resilient body frictional interaction arise. In order to take into account all essential options of the aforementioned issues and specify shell resilient element peculiarities of behavior under operational loads, the authors used the method of laboratory experiments for research. We considered two different contact systems. The first one is a cylindrical shell cut along its generatrix, which contacts a deformable filler. The second system is a cylindrical shell with several incomplete slots interacting with the elastic filler. The stress state and radial displacements of the shells, pliability of the resilient elements, and energy dissipation in the contact systems were time-tracked. As a result, we obtained relations for monitored options of the contact bodies and deformation diagrams for different physical-mechanical and geometrical options of the systems It was found that for a fixed cycle asymmetry coefficient with an increase in the friction coefficient between the shell and the filler, the amount of energy dissipated per cycle gradually decreases. The idea of optimizing shell vibration protection devices according to the criterion of maximum absorption of energy from external influences by determining the required tribological properties of contacting pairs is declared.