Effect of Inerter in Traditional and Variant Dynamic Vibration Absorbers for One Degree-of-Freedom Systems Subjected to Base Excitations

Abstract In this paper, closed-form optimal parameters of inerter-based variant dynamic vibration absorber (variant IDVA) coupled to a primary system subjected to base excitation are derived based on classical fixed-points theory. The proposed variant IDVA is obtained by adding an inerter alone parallel to the absorber damper in the variant dynamic vibration absorber (variant DVA). A new set of optimum frequency and damping ratio of the absorber is derived, thereby resulting in lower maximum amplitude magnification factor than the inerter-based traditional dynamic vibration absorber (traditional IDVA). Under the optimum tuning condition of the absorbers, it is proved both analytically and numerically that the proposed variant IDVA provides a larger suppression of resonant vibration amplitude of the primary system subjected to base excitation. It is demonstrated that adding an inerter alone to the variant DVA provides 19% improvement in vibration suppression than traditional IDVA when the mass ratio is less than 0.2 and the effective frequency bandwidth of the proposed IDVA is wider than the traditional IDVA. The effect of inertance and mass ratio on the amplitude magnification factor of traditional and variant IDVA is also studied.