Vibration Control of a Continuous Beam Under Moving Load Using a Nonlinear Energy Sink

Vibration suppression of a simply supported beam under moving loads is investigated by employing a nonlinear energy sink (NES), which is an essential nonlinear (cubic) oscillator with a vanishing linear stiffness. Dynamic equations of the beam-NES coupled system are established and Galerkin method is applied to discretize the equations. By focusing on an energy dissipation index, an optimization procedure is employed and the optimal parameters of the NES are found. The results demonstrate that beam responses with a NES are reduced significantly compared to the case without NES. In particular, the NES can irreversibly transfer and dissipate vibration energy in a wide frequency range, which thus performs better than the classical linear tuned mass damper (TMD) through a further comparison study.