Energy Absorption and Dissipation Performance in Cycloid Guided Pendulum Absorbers

Abstract

The dynamic energy absorbers are auxiliary systems that are attached to the main structure and widely used as a simple solution for neutralization of vibrations. Among various types of pendulum vibration absorbers are preferable for high-rise buildings, bridges and other civil structures for suppression earthquake-excited vibrations. The problem in dissipating vibration of earthquake is its unknown characteristics such as excitation frequency and magnitude. As a result, designing of an effective self tuning vibration absorber that can adjust its performance according to the excitation frequency will be a challenge. The situation is to have an absorber that can respond at a single frequency for wide range of excitation amplitude so its parameter can be well adjusted for the maximum energy dissipation. It is shown [5] that period in cycloid pendulum is constant for large amplitude. This feature is a major advantage of cycloid pendulum absorbers that could be used in combination with an energy dissipation mechanism to reduce the induced motion in a structure. In this paper, two types of vibration absorbers, i.e., simple and cycloid pendulum are analytically compared. The simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the cycloid damper type in energy absorption/dissipation over a simple pendulum one.