Enhanced passive targeted energy transfer in strongly nonlinear mechanical oscillators

Single-degree-of-freedom (SDOF) nonlinear energy sinks (NESS) can efficiently mitigate broadband disturbances applied to primary linear systems by means of passive targeted energy transfer (TEE), but for a rather limited range of energies. We demonstrate that the TET can be significantly enhanced for broad range of energies by introducing additional internal degrees of freedom to the NES in a highly asymmetric fashion. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the enhanced performance is due to a positive synergistic effect of the internal degrees of freedom of the proposed NES with highly asymmetric stiffnesses. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.