The energy thresholds of nonlinear vibration absorbers

A popular means to mitigate excessive structural vibrations is the attachment of a lightweight spring-mass element, known as a vibration absorber or tuned mass damper. Designing new types of vibration absorbers that outperform the classical linear tuned mass damper is a challenging ongoing research field. This paper focuses on the absorber with a strongly nonlinear spring characteristic. A critical aspect in the design procedure of such nonlinear vibration absorber is the existence of energy thresholds below which no efficient vibration reduction is possible. This paper extends the concept of an energy threshold to a more general parameter threshold representing several threshold values. Two important contributions are obtained. First, one single bifurcation analysis covers every combination of the system parameters. Second, the results are generalized to linear main systems under impulsive load and harmonic load, nonlinear main systems, and general nonlinear spring characteristics.