Atwater Village Cable-Stayed Equestrian Bridge

<p>This will be the second cable-stayed bridge in the city of Los Angeles. In order to mitigate the potential for resonant vibrations during passage of groups of equestrians, a system of tuned mass dampers was designed for the bridge. High-stressed cables are incrementally attached to the 38-meter-tall mast and configured in a fan pattern.</p>

An improved multi-mode seismic vibration control method using multiple tuned mass dampers

Multiple vibration modes of an engineering structure might be excited by earthquake ground motions. Multiple tuned mass dampers (MTMDs) are widely used to control these multi-mode vibrations. However, in the commonly used MTMD system, the mass element in each tuned mass damper (TMD) is normally assumed to be the same. To improve the performance of MTMDs for seismic-induced vibration control, non-uniform MTMD masses are adopted in the present study to improve the mass utilization of TMD, and a location factor is proposed to determine the best location of each TMD in the MTMD system. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated through numerical study. The results show that the proposed method effectively reduces the seismic responses of the structure induced by multiple vibration modes.

Experimental Study on Application of Tuned Mass Dampers for Chatter in Turning of a Thin-Walled Cylinder

Chatter is more likely to occur during the turning process of a thin-walled cylindrical workpiece owing to the low rigidity of such workpieces. Chatter causes intensive vibration, deterioration of the surface finish accuracy, tool damage, and tool wear. Tuned mass dampers (TMD) are usually applied as a passive damping technique to induce a large damping effect using a small mass. This study experimentally investigated the effect of the mounting arrangement and tuning parameters of the TMDs on the production of chatter during the turning process of a thin-walled cylinder, wherein multiple TMDs with extremely small mass ratios were attached to the rotating workpiece. The results of the cutting tests performed by varying the circumferential and axial mounting positions of the TMDs exhibited different characteristics of the chatter suppression effect. Conclusively, the TMDs could suppress the chatter generated by the vibration mode with circumferential nodes if they were mounted on the workpiece to avoid the coincidence of the circumferential arrangement with the pitch of the vibration nodes, regardless of the extremely small mass of the TMDs.

Mass Dampers with Limited Amplitude

Mass dampers are widely used in engineering applications. We consider the effects of limitations on the damper amplitude. Using simple methods to analyze very general mass dampers, we find an upper limit to the damping. The maximum damping logarithmic decrement is δmax = 4μα, where μ is the mass ratio, and α isthe amplitude ratio of damper to structure amplitude. The result is further discussed in relation to Tuned Mass Dampers (TMDs), which can performvery well if there is enough avaliable space. In practice, amplitude limits always apply, and our result can be used to relate these to the damper performance.Our result also applies to active devices, which have to obey the limit mentioned above. Simulated tests of TMDs and other mass dampers are described. The damping is measured both by decay tests and by forced motion test. The methods agree well in the amplitude-limited regime. In other cases, decay tests are difficulet to interpret, indicating that one needs to be very careful whenmeasuring damping of 2DOF systems based solely on decay tests. We hope that our result may inform the selection and design of mass dampers in the future, where one should consider amplitude limits as the very first step.