Research on the design of non-traditional dynamic vibration absorber for damped structures under ground motion

An analytical approach is presented to investigate the optimal problem of non-traditional type of Dynamic vibration absorber (DVA) for damped primary structures subjected to ground motion. Different from the standard configuration, the non-traditional DVA contains a linear viscous damper connecting the absorber mass directly to the ground instead of the main mass. There have been many studies on the design of the non-traditional DVA for undamped primary structures. Those studies have shown that the non-traditional DVA produces better performance than the standard DVA does. When damping is present at the primary system, there are very few works on the non-traditional dynamic vibration absorber. To the best of our knowledge, there is no study on the design of non-traditional DVA for damped structures under ground motion. We propose a simple method to determine the approximate analytical solutions of the nontraditional DVA when the damped primary structure is subjected to ground motion. The main idea of the study is based on the criterion of the equivalent linearization method to replace approximately the original damped structure by an equivalent undamped one. Then the approximate analytical solution of the DVA’s parameters is given by using known results for the undamped structure obtained. Comparisons have been done to validate the effectiveness of the obtained results.