OPTIMUM DESIGN OF A NEW TUNED INERTER MASS DAMPER (TIMD) PASSIVE VIBRATION CONTROL FOR STOCHASTICALLY MOTION-EXCITED STRUCTURES

The inerter that is referred to as a two-terminal device that provides resisting forces proportional to the relative accelerations between its two terminals has been widely applied in vibration control due to its mass amplification effect. In this paper, a new inerter-based damper is proposed to take advantage of the inerter, which consists of a rack-pinion inerter in conjunction with a tuned rotational inertia damper. Unlike any other inerterbased dampers, the rotational inertia damper is connected to the pinion of the inerter via a rotational spring and damper. As a result, the weight of the damper can be significantly reduced. The proposed damper is applied to single-degree-of-freedom primary structures and a two-degree-of-freedom structure and the H2 optimization is conducted to obtain the optimum tuning ratio and damping ratio analytically. When comparing the proposed damper with its counterpart reported in the literature, the proposed damper achieves 20% to 70% improvement when their weights are identical.