Vibration reduction of beams under successive traveling loads by means of linear and nonlinear dynamic absorbers

The goal of the present work is to assess the performances of dynamic vibration absorbers (DVA) in suppressing the vibrations of a simply supported beam subjected to an infinite sequence of regularly spaced concentrated moving loads. In particular, several types of DVA are considered: linear, cubic, higher odd-order monomials and piecewise linear stiffness; linear, cubic and linear-quadratic viscous damping. The purpose is to clarify if nonlinear DVAs show improvements with respect to the classical linear devices. The dynamic scenario is deeply investigated in a wide range of operating conditions, spanning the parameter space of the DVA (damping, stiffness). Nonlinear stiffness can lead to complex dynamics such as quasi-periodic, chaotic and sub-harmonic responses; moreover, acting on the stiffness nonlinearity no improvement is found with respect to the linear DVA. A nonlinear non-symmetric dissipation in the DVA leads to a great reduction of the beam response, the reduction is larger with respect to the linear DVA. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.