Beyond the Tuned Mass Damper: a Comparative Study of Passive Approaches to Vibration Absorption Through Antiresonance Assignment

Vibration absorption is a core research area in the design and control of structures and machines, and exploiting antiresonances is an effective approach for systems under harmonic excitation. This paper proposes a comparative study and a review of the main passive techniques to antiresonance assignment proposed in the recent literature, by discussing them through some numerical examples too. The techniques discussed include the well-known Tuned Mass Damper, which has been widely developed in the literature. However, as the title reveals, great attention is paid to the methods inherited from the field of dynamic structural modification that assign antiresonances without modifying the number of degrees of freedom, by exploiting a proper modification of the system inertial and stiffness parameters. Due to higher mathematical complexity, these approaches have been less investigated in the literature although they are an effective and less invasive approach to antiresonance assignment, especially for machines. To puzzle out the complicated subject matter of antiresonances, their background and their key features are also discussed by reviewing the main theoretical results and their relationship with the assignment techniques. The paper is also enriched with several numerical examples to compare different methods and investigate the features of antiresonances. The concluding remarks of the paper bring together some open issues in this field of research and outlines some possible research directions.