On the undamped vibration absorber with cubic stiffness characteristics

Abstract

In order to improve the performance of a vibration absorber, a nonlinear spring can be used on purpose. This paper presents an analytical insight on the characteristics of an undamped nonlinear vibration absorber when it is attached to a linear spring-mass-damper oscillator. In particular, the nonlinear attachment is modelled as a Duffing's oscillator with a spring characteristics having a linear positive stiffness term plus a cubic stiffness term. The effects of the nonlinearity, mass ratio and frequency ratio are investigated based on an approximate analytical formulation of the amplitude-frequency equation. Comparisons to the linear case are shown in terms of the frequency response curves. The nonlinear absorber seems to show an improved robustness to mistuning respect to the corresponding linear device. However, such a better robustness may be limited by some instability of the expected harmonic response.