A nonlinear magnetic vibration absorber is presented and used to control vibration of a three-storey structure. A distinctive feature of the absorber concerns its versatility for tuning the linear and nonlinear stiffness coefficients, depending on simple geometric design parameters such as the distance between fixed magnets and the moving one. In particular, the absorber can be set either as a nonlinear tuned vibration absorber, a nonlinear energy sink, or a bistable tuned vibration absorber, according to whether the linear stiffness term is positive, vanishing, or negative. The response of the primary structure and the vibration mitigation are investigated in the cases of impulsive shock, free vibration with imposed initial displacement, and single frequency excitation. Significant reductions of the primary structure vibrations are obtained for the three cases investigated, showing the ability of using a vibration absorber only relying on magnetic forces for passive control. The detailed comparisons of the absorbers performance show that, in this case study, no general guidelines can be easily deduced for selecting one of the three tunings for a nonlinear absorber. Depending on the excitation, the vibratory levels, and the frequency content of the excitation, the three configurations show advantages and drawbacks that are discussed.

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ABSTRACT. Vibration-based methods are well-established and effective tools to assess the health state of civil, mechanical and aerospace engineering structures. However, their reliability is still affected by the variability of the features commonly used for damage detection. Environmental effects and changes in operational conditions are the main sources of variability in the structural response. As a consequence, the modal identification used to extract damage sensitive features has to face constricting requirements in terms of signals stationarity and performance accuracy. Moreover, with reference to the damage assessment, large variations of monitored features mask subtle effects due to damage, which remain undetected. This study is conceived to address both these issues by focusing, in particular, on the non-stationarity of the loading conditions of tensioned structures, such as cables and pre-stressed beams. The capability of spectral methods to deal with the modal identification of non-stationary systems is enhanced by a curve-fitting procedure based on nonlinear least squares optimisation. Wavelet analysis is applied for comparison and validation of the FFT-based technique. Identified natural frequencies are then used for the damage detection, exploiting the capacity of singular values decomposition to discriminate between damage-related events and the intrinsic non-stationary nature of the structural response. A reduced-order realization of the features set is performed to amplify changes not belonging to measurement variability but deriving from exogenous events, such as damage. The proposed methodology is validated by experimental analyses carried out on beams subjected to time-varying loading conditions in order to simulate the health monitoring of quasi and non-stationary systems.