H2 Approach for Optimally Tuning Passive Vibration Absorbers to Flexible Structures

PASSIVE damping by vibration absorbers has been proven both reliable and successful in many areas of vibration control. Research into the optimal tuning of vibration absorbers has received increased attention lately; however, these tuning methods have only been practical on low-order systems (one or two modes). The design of a vibration absorber system is an optimization problem. In the general case, it is desired to couple multiple vibration absorbers to a structure with multiple vibrational modes. If the total mass of all of the actuators is fixed to some small value compared to the mass of the structure, then the design parameters are the set of absorber stiffnesses and damping coefficients.