Experimental investigation on multi-mode vortex-induced vibration control of stay cable installed with pounding tuned mass dampers

In this paper, pounding tuned mass dampers (PTMDs) were designed to mitigate the multi-mode vortex-induced vibration (VIV) of stay cable utilizing the viscous-elastic material\'s energy-dissipated ability. The PTMD device consists of a cantilever metal rod beam, a metal mass block and a specially designed damping element covered with viscous-elastic material layer. Wind-tunnel experiment on VIV of stay cable model was set up to validate the effectiveness of the PTMD on multi-mode VIV mitigation of stay cable. By analyzing and comparing testing results of all testing cases, it could be verified that the PTMD with viscous-elastic pounding boundary can obviously mitigate the VIV amplitude of the stay cable. Moreover, the installed location and the design parameters of the PTMD device based on the controlled modes of the primary stay cable, would have a certain extent suppression on the other modal vibration of the stay cable, which means that the designed PTMDs are effective among a large band of frequency for the multi-mode VIV control of the stay cable.