Piezoelectric Actuated Nonlinear Energy Sink With Tunable Attenuation Efficiency

Comparing to linear vibration absorbers, nonlinear energy sinks (NESs) have attracted worldwide attention for their intrinsic characteristics of targeted energy transfer or energy pumping in a relatively wide frequency range. Unfortunately, they are highly dependent on the vibration amplitude to be attenuated and will play its role only if the external load exceeds a specific threshold value. Different from the passive bistable NES, a novel piezoelectric nonlinear energy sink (PNES) is designed by introducing in-phase actuation to compensate or enhance the external vibration loads, thus triggering the NES operating in high attenuation efficiency. The nonlinear mathematic model of the PNES is established for investigating the dynamic response and determining the threshold compensation strategy. And the results show that the maximum attenuation efficiency can be improved by 58.16% compared to the traditional passive NES. Also, the amplitude-dependent coefficient (ADC) can be significantly reduced to 0.33 from 1.0, which means that the PNES can effectively mitigate vibrations even when the excitation amplitude is 67% smaller than the original threshold value. Finally, the feasibility of the in-phase compensation method is experimentally validated, which can further expand the application range of NES.