Effect of detuning conditions on the performance of non-traditional tuned mass dampers under external excitation

The tuned mass damper (TMD) is a widely used passive control device which is attached to a main system to suppress undesired vibration. In this paper, a non-traditional form of TMD system is investigated. Unlike the traditional TMD configuration, the considered TMD system has a linear viscous damper connecting the absorber mass directly to the ground instead of the main mass. There have been some studies on the optimization design of the non-traditional TMD (NT-TMD) for undamped main structures. Those studies have indicated that the NT-TMD provides better performance than the traditional TMD does. When there is a frequency shifting in the structural frequency or tuning frequency of TMD, to the best knowledge of the authors, there has been no study on the performance of the NT-TMD. The main idea of the study is to investigate the effect of frequency detuning on the control performance of the NT-TMD. The optimum parameters of the NT-TMD system and corresponding effectiveness are obtained for different mass ratios of the NT-TMD system. The numerical results indicate that the NT-TMD with high mass ratio provides better robustness to the changes in the target frequency ratio than the traditional TMD.