Performance evaluation for inerter-based dynamic vibration absorbers

This paper is concerned with the H-infinity and H-2 optimization problem for inerter-based dynamic vibration absorbers (IDVAs). The proposed IDVAs are obtained by replacing the damper in the traditional dynamic vibration absorber (TDVA) with some inerter-based mechanical networks. It is demonstrated in this paper that adding one inerter alone to the TDVA provides no benefits for the H-infinity performance and negligible improvement (less than 0.32% improvement over the TDVA when the mass ratio less than 1) for the H-2 performance. This implies the necessity of introducing another degree of freedom (element) together with inerter to the TDVA. Therefore, four different IDVAs are proposed by adding an inerter together with a spring to the TDVA, and significant improvement for both the H-infinity and H-2 performances is obtained. Numerical simulations in dimensionless form show that more than 20% and 10% improvement can be obtained for the H-infinity and H-2 performances, respectively. Besides, for the H-infinity performance, the effective frequency band can be further widened by using inerter. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.