Back-iron design-based electromagnetic regenerative tuned mass damper

Abstract

Implementation of tuned mass dampers is the commonly used approach to avoid excessive vibrations in civil engineering. However, due to the absence of the compact dimension, there are still no practical applications of the tuned mass dampers in automotive industry. Meanwhile, recent investigations showed the benefit of utilizing a tuned mass damper in a vehicle suspension in terms of driving comfort and road holding. Thus, the current investigation aimed to explore a novel compact dimension tuned mass damper, which can provide both sufficient vibration mitigation and energy harvesting. This paper presents a prototype of a back-iron-based design of an electromagnetic regenerative tuned mass damper. The mathematical model of the tuned mass damper system was developed and has been validated by the experimental results of the tuned mass damper prototype implemented in a protected mass test-bench. The indicated results concluded that the attenuation performance dramatically deteriorated under random excitations and a reduction in the root-mean-square acceleration of 18% is concluded compared to the case with undamped tuned mass damper. Under harmonic excitations, the designed tuned mass damper prototype is able to reduce the peak acceleration value of the protected structure by 79%. According to the experimental results, the designed tuned mass damper prototype revealed a peak regenerative power of 0.76 W under a harmonic excitation of 8.1 Hz frequency $125\times {10}^{-6}$ m amplitude. Given the simulated random road profiles from C to E, the back-iron electromagnetic tuned mass damper indicated that root-mean-square harvested power from 0.6 to 6.4 W, respectively.