Hybrid skyhook mass damper

Abstract

The objective of this study is to increase the efficiency of an initial passive Tuned Mass Damper (TMD) by adding an active control unit. A critical issue in many engineering domains is the design of fail-safe active systems. The proposed hybrid system aims to address this issue and realizes the said objective. It emulates the behavior of a skyhook damper parallel to a passive TMD. Skyhook dampers acts like viscous dampers connected to the ground, reducing the vibration amplitudes without any overshoot. It can be difficult to design a specific control law to obtain a desired dynamical behavior. The paper presents two ways to understand and design the hyperstable control law for Hybrid Mass Damper (HMD) (also called Active TMD), using the power flow formulation or the mechanical impedance analysis. These approaches are illustrated through the synthesis of this hybrid device and the emulation of the Skyhook damper. It is shown that a well-designed control law for this kind of system may result in high damping performance, ensuring stability and a fail-safe behavior. In addition, the amplitude of the primary system’s response is reduced over the entire frequency range which is not the case for the usual active or hybrid systems. Robustness is analyzed and compared to that of the classical active mass damper, and an experimental set up validates the proposed hybrid system.