Cable Vibration Mitigation with a Tuned Viscous Mass Damper

Recent studies have demonstrated that the use of a tuned viscous mass damper (TVMD) is an effective approach for mitigating structural vibration. This paper investigates the performance of TVMD on cable vibration mitigation. Firstly, the dynamic formulation of the cable-TVMD system was established by the finite difference method. Based on the performance evaluation indexes of the modal damping ratio and the dynamic magnification factor, a cable attached with a TVMD was subsequently studied. Furthermore, based on the dynamic magnification factor at the cable midspan, a practical design methodology using contour plots was proposed for the cases where a viscous damper (VD), a viscous inertial mass damper (VMD), and a TVMD are attached to a cable. Finally, the effectiveness of the VD, the VMD, and the TVMD in mitigating cable vibrations was compared. It is shown that the TVMD has superior cable vibration mitigation performance to VD and VMD.