A novel eddy current damper with hybrid excitation is presented in this paper. The eddy current damper contains two hybrid excitation components and a moving conductor plate. The hybrid excitation component is consisted of primary coil, the primary iron core and permanent magnet. The conductor plate is sandwiched between two excitation components. Analyses of the proposed damper are conducted with analytical method and FEA respectively. The analysis results validate the feasibility of the design and the correctness of the developed analytical model. The optimization method of the damping effect is studied based on numerical computation with the employment of the Taguchi optimization method. The simulation results stated that the damping force was increased by 32.16% with the proposed method.