Optimum Design of a New Tuned Inerter-Torsional-Mass-Damper Passive Vibration Control for Stochastically Motion-Excited Structures

Abstract

The inerter is referred to as a two-terminal device that provides inertial forces proportional to the relative accelerations between its two terminals. It has been widely applied in vibration control due to its mass amplification effect. In this paper, a new inerter-based damper is proposed to take advantage of the mass amplification effect, which consists of the classic rack-pinion inerter in conjunction with a torsional tuned mass damper. Unlike any other topologies of inerter-based dampers, the torsional mass damper is connected to the pinion of the inerter via a rotational spring and viscous damper. As a result, the weight of the torsional mass damper can be significantly reduced. The proposed damper is applied to single-degree-of-freedom primary structures and a two degrees-of-freedom structure, and the H2 optimization is conducted to obtain the optimum tuning ratio and damping ratio analytically. When comparing the proposed damper with its counterpart reported in the literature, the proposed damper achieves 20–70% improvement when their weights are identical.