A dual-stage inerter-enhanced nonlinear energy sink

Both the nonlinear energy sink (NES) and the inerters have received extensive attention in the field of vibration control. In this study, we propose a dual-stage inerter-enhanced NES (IE-NES) to be an enhanced for substantial transmissibility reduction with tunable performance. The harmonic balance method and the Runge–Kutta method are employed to obtain the system responses. Computational results demonstrate good agreement between the analytical and numerical solutions. Parametric studies suggest that the inertance of inerters attached to the different NES masses has diverse effects on the vibration mitigation capacity of the IE-NES system. All the simulations are implemented in the vicinity of 1:1 resonance. It is found that the IE-NES improves the target energy transfer efficiency with proper inertance, leading to high-efficient vibration suppression. In addition, the inerter-induced new dynamics properties such as the transition among different response regimes are investigated. The study on the influence of the initial conditions and global bifurcation is exerted to reveal the complex dynamic behaviour of the IE-NES under various working conditions. The results show that such a type of NES paves a new road for advanced NES design.