Enhanced tuned mass damper using an inertial amplification mechanism

This paper proposes a novel inertial-amplification-mechanism (IAM) to enhance the vibration mitigation performance of the classical tuned mass damper (TMD). To this aim, the IAM is coupled to a standard TMD to form a so-called IAM-TMD. Analytical derivations are developed to extend the theory of the classical TMD to the IAM-TMD. Next, H∞ and H2 optimizations are performed and closed-form solutions for the optimal parameters of the IAM-TMD are obtained. Parametric studies are conducted to evaluate the influence of the geometrical configuration of the IAM system on the performance of the IAM-TMD. Finally, numerical simulations are performed to validate the efficiency of the IAM-TMD. In details, time history analyses of a structure without TMD, with TMD, and with IAM-TMD under harmonic and earthquake ground motions are computed and compared. Results show that when using the classical TMD, dynamic responses of the primary structure are suppressed, but the responses of the absorber are relatively large. Conversely, when using the IAM-TMD, dynamic responses of both the primary structure and the absorber are mitigated at the same time.