Tautochronic centrifugal pendulum vibration absorbers General design and analysis

Since the 1930s, centrifugal pendulum vibration absorbers have been used in rotating and reciprocating machinery for the attenuation of torsional vibrations. A large variety of absorber types were suggested and the design was done by linearization theory until the introduction of the tautochronic bifilar pendulum absorbers. Since then, the performance and dynamic stability of this specific absorber type have been considered in analytical and numerical investigations. Different perturbations, e.g. nonlinear mistuning, were considered in order to optimize the system performance, but the characteristic bifilar design remained unchanged. In this paper, a general approach for the design of tautochronic pendulum vibration absorbers is proposed. As a result, it is possible to deal with a large variety of non-bifilar centrifugal vibration absorber designs which provide application-related optimal performance and resolve some of the existing design limitations. Established analytic predictions that show a satisfactory agreement with numerical as well as experimental investigations for bifilar absorbers are not applicable for the comparison of different tautochronic absorbers. Therefore, the second part of this work shows how to analyze this class of centrifugal vibration absorbers using a Hamiltonian formulation. Successive canonical transformations lead to nonlinear equations in action-angle variables, which are then approximated to first order and analyzed by using the method of averaging. These results provide a basis for the design and analysis of tautochronic bifilar and non-bifilar vibration absorbers. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.