Mitigation of Structural Vibrations of MDOF Oscillators by Modal Coupling Due to Hysteretic Dampers

In civil engineering, structural elements characterized by hysteresis are often encountered, such as materials with limited elastic fields, microsliding friction and elastomeric absorbers. Hysteretic nonlinearities produce a wide variety of dynamical phenomena, such as significant modal coupling, bifurcations and superabundant modes. This paper investigates nonlinear modal interactions in the dynamic response of a two-degree-of-freedom system (2DOF) with hysteretic elements. These phenomena are notably important in internal resonance conditions, where modal interactions produce strong modifications in the response with possible beneficial effects. In specific conditions, the transfer of energy between the two modes leads to a notable reduction in the maximum response amplitude; the exploitation of this feature to achieve vibration mitigation of the forced response is the main goal of the paper. Two configurations are investigated: the hysteretic element at the top (vibration damper) and the hysteretic element at the base (isolator). In both cases, several internal resonance conditions occur since, by increasing the excitation intensity, the frequencies of the hysteretic system change, as well as their ratio. Qualitative similar results are obtained, characterized by a transfer of energy between the two modes. For both configurations, the usefulness of exploiting these nonlinear phenomena in vibration mitigation has been shown.