A new vibration absorber based on the hysteresis of multi-configuration NiTiNOL-steel wire ropes assemblies

A new vibration absorber based on the restoring forces of NiTiNOL and mixed NiTiNOL-steel wire ropes subject to flexural and coupled tensile-flexural states is presented. The peculiar hysteresis of the device is due to the simultaneous presence of interwire friction and phase tranformations. An extension of the Bouc-Wen model is proposed to fit the experimental force-displacement cycles by employing the Differential Evolutionary optimization algorithm. The genetic-like optimization is carried out both for the constitutive identification and for the design of the vibration absorber. The effectiveness of the device is proved experimentally by a series of shaking table tests on a multi-story scale building.