A comparative study on transient vibration suppression of magnetic nonlinear vibration absorbers with different arrangements

Nonlinear vibration absorbers (NVA) using magnets feature ease of implementation and outstanding tunability and have attracted much interest in vibration suppression in recent years. Through configuration design and optimization, magnetic NVA can exhibit different nonlinear characteristics such as monostability, bistability and tristability. This work performs a comprehensive comparative study on the transient vibration suppression performances of the NVAs with four different magnet arrangements based on the cantilever beam design, including the NVA with two repulsive magnets (2RMNVA), two attractive magnets (2AMNVA), three repulsive magnets (3RMNVA) and three attractive magnets (3AMNVA). Based on the dipole–dipole model of magnets, the dynamic model of the system containing different magnetic NVAs is established for numerical simulation and the key parameters of each NVA are optimized under different excitation levels. The influence of parameters on different magnetic NVAs is investigated. Based on the optimization configurations, the rate of the energy dissipation from the primary structure by different magnetic NVAs is compared by wavelet transform analysis. The results show that due to the largest oscillations of crossing outmost wells, the optimized 3RMNVA and 3AMNVA are the preferred configurations for magnetic NVA under different excitation levels. Meanwhile, through the verification and comparison with reported designs, the effectiveness of the optimization method and the optimized NVAs in this paper are confirmed. This work provides the approach and guidelines to design the effective NVA to suppress transient vibrations.