Adaptive Electromagnetic Vibration Absorber for a Multimode Structure

Abstract

All structures experience vibrations due to external dynamic force excitations, such as earthquakes and wind loadings. At resonance, the impact of this natural dynamic force on structures may lead to structural failures. Hence, an absorber is mounted to absorb vibrations from the primary system. Unfortunately, passive tuned mass absorbers can only target a single frequency. Since structural buildings possess multiple modes, an adaptive or tune-able vibration absorber is needed to attenuate the vibration in a multi-degree of freedom (MDOF) system. In this work, an adaptive electromagnetic vibration absorber (AEMVA) is proposed to eliminate the effects of vibrations and is dynamically tuned using electromagnets. By varying the current supplied to the coil, the stiffness of the AEMVA can be adjusted, resulting in a varying absorber frequency. A mathematical description of the AEMVA on a three-story prototype model building is also presented. The three-story benchmark model was used to demonstrate the effectiveness of AEMVA in absorbing multiple vibration modes, both analytically and experimentally. It is shown that 68.81 %, 50.49 %, and 33.45 % of vibration amplitude reductions were achieved at the first, second, and third modes, respectively.