Damping of a taut cable with two attached high damping rubber dampers

Due to their low intrinsic damping, stay cables in cable-stayed bridges have often exhibited unanticipated and excessive vibrations which result in increasing maintenance frequency and disruption to normal operations of the entire bridges. Mitigation of undesired cable vibration can be achieved by attaching an external damping device near the anchorage. High Damping Rubber (HDR) dampers have many advantages such as compact size, better aesthetics, easy maintenance, temperature stability, and cost benefits; therefore, they have been widely used to increase cable damping. Although a single damper has been shown to reduce cable vibrations, it is not the most effective method due to geometric constraints. This paper proposes the use of two HDR dampers to improve effectiveness and robustness in suppressing cable vibration. Oscillation parameters of the cable-dampers system were investigated in detail by modeling the stay cable as a taut string and each HDR damper as complex-valued impedance and by using an analytical formulation of the complex eigenvalue problem. The problem of two HDR dampers arbitrarily located along a cable is solved and the solution is discussed. Asymptotic formulas to calculate the damping ratios of the cable with two HDR dampers installed near the anchorage(s) are proposed and compared with the exact solutions. Further, a design example is presented in order to justify the methodology. The results of this study show that when the two HDR dampers are installed close to each other on the same end of the cable, some interaction between the dampers leads to reduced damping ratio. When the dampers are on the opposite ends of the cable, they are effective in increasing damping ratio and can provide better vibration reduction to multiple modes.