Experimental study of the semi-active mass damper under impulse excitation

Mass dampers usually aim to control the steady state vibration of harmonic excitation, but few efforts have focused on suppressing the transient vibration caused by impulse excitation. To obtain the optimum tuning parameters of the semi-active tuned mass damper (TMD) under impulse, optimization analysis of the transient vibration response is carried out. The analytical solutions of transient response are obtained. The transient response of the primary system is attenuated effectively by optimizing three parameters of the TMD, namely, the stiffness, initial displacement, and initial velocity. Three experimental setups are built to achieve different values of the parameters to verify the simulation results. The stiffness of the TMD is modeled analytically and experimentally, and the vibration magnitude denotes that there are several fluctuations when the stiffness of the TMD changes. The results also show that initial displacement and initial velocity of the TMD can lead to different transient vibration magnitudes for the primary system. The optimum parameters of the semi-active TMD can be obtained by the proposed method, and the transient response can be controlled by optimizing the stiffness, initial displacement, and initial velocity of the TMD.