Optimized negative stiffness damper with flexible support for stay cables

Abstract

The negative stiffness damper (NSD) has been gaining increasing attention for cable vibration control owing to its superior energy dissipation capacity. Recent research has implied that a flexible support, rather than a rigid support, might be advantageous to improving the performance of an NSD. This study further simplifies the design of an NSD for multimode cable vibration control by leveraging the potential advantages of a flexible support. First, an equivalent model is established for the NSD support system. The deformation across the support is illustrated. Through parametric analysis, the parameter ranges for which the support flexibility exhibits various types of impacts on the damping force are obtained. Thereafter, to ensure rigidity, the lower limit of the support stiffness is determined. An optimization procedure is proposed for the single-mode cable vibration. The method of determination of the optimized NSD and its corresponding support is presented. On this basis, a simplified method is eventually developed for multimode cable vibration. A full-scale cable on a real bridge is adopted as the design prototype. A series of performance evaluations is conducted for validation. The theoretical and numerical results indicate that a small-sized NSD with a flexible support is capable of realizing the required damping. An optimized support stiffness is found to be independent of the vibration mode. Therefore, it may be concluded that only the highest mode should be taken into consideration and it considerably simplifies the design of the NSD for multimode cable vibration.

Stay cable vibration mitigation: A review

“…Optimal design of NSDs and dampers for multimode vibrations have been considered by Javanbakht et al (2018) and Javanbakht et al (2020b). When considering damper support flexibility, the effects of springs with positive and negative stiffness in series were discussed in cable vibration control (Dong and Cheng, 2021; Javanbakht et al, 2020a; Zhang et al, 2019b; Zhou et al, 2020a, 2021b). Performance of cable dampers with linear hysteretic damping, e.g., HDR dampers, can also be improved using the NSD by reducing their inherent stiffness (Sun et al, 2022c).…”

Analysis of Amplification Effect and Optimal Control of the Toggle-Style Negative Stiffness Viscous Damper

“…Chen et al [37][38][39][40] pointed out that lower support stiffness would lead to a reduced energy dissipation in viscous damping systems. However, the studies of Wang et al [19,20,41] revealed that flexible supports were advantageous in increasing the energy dissipation of the negative stiffness viscous damper systems. Therefore, a negative stiffness damping system and an amplification device can be combined to achieve a dual increase in a damper's energy consumption.…”

Cable vibration mitigation by using an H‐bridge‐based electromagnetic inerter damper with energy harvesting function

“…Meanwhile, its integration with a tuned mass damper (TMD) was investigated 12,13 . Cable vibration mitigation utilizing negative stiffness elements was also conducted 14–18 . Shi et al 15 integrated negative stiffness and viscous damping to enhance cable vibration control.…”

“…12,13 Cable vibration mitigation utilizing negative stiffness elements was also conducted. [14][15][16][17][18] Shi et al 15 integrated negative stiffness and viscous damping to enhance cable vibration control. Chen et al 19 conducted a unified analysis of negative stiffness damper and inerterbased absorber for cable structures.…”