SMART TUNED STIFFNESS DAMPER

Yanbu Industrial College (YIC), Royal Commission for Jubail and Yanbu,

P.O. Box 30426 Madinat Yanbu Al Sinaiyah, KSA.

Production Engineering & Mechanical Design Department, Faculty of Engineering, Menoufia

University, Shebin El Kom, Egypt.

This paper aims to introduce a new adaptive design of vibration control systems. A Tunable

Stiffness Damper (TSD), stepper motor moving on an elastic element, is used as a wide

frequency range vibration controller. It can track and suppress only one target frequency of

the vibrating system within its frequency range. Modeling, simulation and tests are used to

check the proposed design under different excitation methods. Matlab was used in the

simulation process in frequency, modal and time domains of the structure with and without

the proposed design. Impact, sinusoidal and step relaxation excitation methods were used in

the experimental study of the proposed design. A control program was written and control

circuit was built and implemented to control the motion of TSD. Numerical simulations and

experimental results illustrate the success of the controller. In this design, the measurement of

the damping force and torques is not required, it is also highly possible to maintain the sliding

modes and achieve a high robustness against structure model uncertainties and disturbances

along with an ability to control biaxial excitation, clearly demonstrating its advantages for

vibration control of multi-degree-of-freedom (MDOF) structures.