Serial pendulum DVA design using Genetic Algorithm (GA) by considering the pendulum nonlinearity

A serial pendulum dynamic vibration absorber (DVA) was designed to suppress the vibration of two degrees of freedom (Two-DOF) structure model. The optimal DVA parameters are selected using a genetic algorithm (GA) by minimizing the fitness function formulated from the system's frequency response function (FRF). Two fitness function criteria, using one and two target frequency ranges, were utilized to calculate the optimal DVA parameters. The optimized serial pendulum DVA parameters were used to reduce structural vibration under free and forced excitation conditions. The simulation study found that the serial pendulum DVA can effectively reduce the vibration response for a small excitation amplitude. However, the DVA performance decreases for a large excitation amplitude due to the nonlinearity of pendulum motion, and the percentage of vibration response attenuation is smaller than that obtained using a small excitation amplitude.