The Experimental Performance of a Nonlinear Dynamic Vibration Absorber

This paper investigates the physical behaviour and effectiveness of a nonlinear dynamic vibration absorber (NDVA). The nonlinear absorber considered involves a nonlinear hardening spring which was designed and attached to a cantilever beam excited by a shaker. The cantilever beam can be considered at low frequencies as a linear single degree-of-freedom system. The nonlinear attachment is designed to behave as a hardening Duffing oscillator. The nonlinearity of the attachment is due to the particular geometrical configuration undergoing a large amplitude response. The experiment investigated the potential for vibration reduction of the system Analytical and numerical results are presented and compared. From the measured results it was observed that the NDVA had a much wider effective bandwidth compared to a linear absorber. The frequency response curve of the NDVA has the effect of moving the second resonant peak to a higher frequency away from the tuned frequency so that the device is robust to mistuning.