Influence of additional mass and connection of nonlinear energy sinks on vibration reduction performance

The broadband vibration reduction performance of nonlinear energy sink (NES) has attracted wide attention. However, the impact of the NES’s additional mass other than the oscillator and how it is connected to the primary structure has been ignored. More recently, it has been discovered that vibration attenuation through the cellular application of NES can achieve greater efficiency. However, the connection between NES cells and the primary structure, as well as between cells, has not been studied. In this study, by considering the additional mass of the NES cells, the influence of the connection modes of NES cells on the vibration reduction efficiency is investigated theoretically, optimally and experimentally for the first time. The forced vibration models of linear oscillator coupled with NES cells are established by viscoelastic connection and rigid connection respectively. The approximate analysis and numerical analysis show that the vibration reduction efficiency of NES cells is affected by the resonance frequency of the primary structure and the external excitation intensity and shows a nonlinear trend. With the change of the resonant frequency of the primary structure, the viscoelastic connection NES cells can almost always obtain higher vibration reduction efficiency than the rigid connection NES cells. The global bifurcation results show that the strongly modulated responses of the structure can be triggered by the viscoelastic connection. Moreover, the connection modes between NES cells also affect the vibration reduction efficiency. The optimal parameters of the connection damping and connection stiffness are obtained by the particle swarm optimization algorithm. Finally, the viscoelastic connection and rigid connection, and the effect of the connection mode between NES cells on the vibration reduction efficiency are compared by experiments. The conclusions of theoretical research are verified. This work can provide theoretical guidance for the engineering application of NES cells.