Vibration Reduction Using an Attached Local Nonlinear Passive Absorber Based on a Clamped-Clamped Thin Blade

The concept of nonlinear targeted energy transfer also named energy pumping can be used to passively reduce the vibrations of a primary system by attaching to it an essentially nonlinear damped oscillator also named Nonlinear Energy Sink (NES). In this paper, a thin blade clamped beam is considered as a NES device and studied experimentally. This NES configuration is an alternative way to design an essential stiffness nonlinearity. The behavior of the thin blade structure is first analyzed experimentally and numerically using a 1 DOF nonlinear oscillator. Next, experimental results are presented to demonstrate that the thin blade NES can efficiently reduce the vibrations of a flexible structure. The test set-up is composed of a primary system and the NES. The primary system is a steel beam clamped at one of its end and the NES is attached at the primary structure by its rigid base. Experimental results are discussed and also compared to simulated results obtained from a model.