On the assessment of a tunable auxiliary mass damper with a friction damper in its suspension: numerical study

Auxiliary Mass Damper‘s (AMD) performance is susceptible to changes in the frequency or in the excitation force’s nature. Therefore, to improve the robustness of the AMD it’s necessary to design new systems which are tunable and that could be used over large frequency range. In this work a friction damper, which is an association in series of a spring and a scratcher, is used to tune the AMD at the same time it dissipates the mechanical energy of the principal mass by changing the normal force on the scratcher. Three normal force control strategies, and two combinations of them, are studied: i) The normal force is assumed constant; ii) The normal force is obtained from the solution of the equation of motion assuming null displacement for the principal mass; iii) The normal force is obtained based on the vibratory system’s state variables condition, guarantying that the direction of the friction force promotes the movement of the principal mass toward its static equilibrium position. The effectiveness of the proposed tunable AMD, where the adaptability is obtained by controlling the normal force on the smart friction damper, is evaluated based on mass and frequency ratios variations for each strategy.