Comparison of a modified vibro-impact nonlinear energy sink with other kinds of NESs

Vibration mitigation is essential to many dynamical and engineering structures that are subjected to destructive vibration amplitudes induced by impulsive loading, seismic excitation, blasts, flutter, collisions, fluid–structure interaction and so on. Unprotected structures by vibration absorbers could be exposed to failure which lead to enormous losses in human lives, major equipment and economy. Employing the nonlinear targeted energy transfer (TET) concept in nonlinear vibration absorbers which are later called as nonlinear energy sinks has ignited a very rapid research interest since 2001. Up-to-date, considerable growth in the NESs field has taken place. Accordingly, various types of NESs have been introduced for vibration mitigation in variety of dynamical and structural engineering systems. The types of introduced NESs included, but not limited to, stiffness-based, rotating and the vibro-impact NESs. Among these common types of NESs, the most effective and efficient one is the single-sided vibro-impact (SSVI) nonlinear energy sink (NES). However, most of investigations has implemented a coefficient of restitution of 0.7 which closely corresponds to a steel-to-steel impact. Therefore, this paper is aimed to further improve the SSVI NES by including the coefficient of restitution in the performance optimization. Accordingly, significant improvement in the SSVI NES performance is obtained when the coefficient of restitution is found to be near 0.45. In addition, performance comparison between the enhanced SSVIe NES with several existing types of NESs is performed here where a nine-story large-scale structure is employed for this numerical comparison. Accordingly, the performance of the enhanced SSVIe NES of nearly 0.45 coefficient of restitution is found to be more robust to the initial impulsive energy levels and to its physical parameters variation than other kinds of existing NESs.