Study on Vibration Characteristics of Stay Cable-Nonlinear Viscous Damper System

Abstract

Tension cables are easily prone to generating varied vibrations under the action of external loads, which adversely affects the safety of bridges. Therefore, it is necessary to take effective measures to suppress the vibrations of tension cables. Cable end dampers are widely used in vibration reduction for cable-stayed bridges due to their convenient installation and low costs. However, the previous studies on the tension cable-viscous damper systems mostly adopt the linear method, and the weakening effect of the flexibility of mounting brackets on the damper vibration reduction is not sufficiently taken into account. Therefore, this paper adopts the improved Kelvin model to conduct the derivation, solution, and parametric analysis of vibration equations for the stay cable-nonlinear viscous damper systems. The results of parametric analysis show that the maximum modal damping ratio that can be obtained by cables and the corresponding optimal damping coefficient of dampers are correlated with the damping nonlinear coefficient α , stiffness nonlinear coefficient β , vibration order n , installation position a / L , and stiffness coefficient μ , etc.; among them, n damping nonlinear coefficient α and stiffness nonlinear coefficient β are the key parameters that affect the parameter design of dampers, where damping nonlinear coefficient α mainly controls the optimal damping coefficient and stiffness nonlinear coefficient β mainly controls the maximum damping ratio. Based on the parametric analysis, the design principles of dampers and value requirements of key parameters under different vibration suppression objectives are presented.