Identification of Nonlinear Characteristics of an Additive Manufactured Vibration Absorber

Additive manufacturing has become increasingly popular in the last decades and has shown great potential for designing and manufacturing innovative design solutions. Recently it has been demonstrated that additive manufacturing can be used to create monolithic compliant mechanisms that can avoid assembly and relative movement between components, showing considerable advantages in their use in harsh environments (i.e. space applications). In this paper, we explore the possibility of adopting 3D-printed compliant mechanisms as tuned-mass vibration absorbers: the challenge is to identify the characteristics of an equivalent nonlinear oscillator that can be used to assess the performance of the absorber. The experimental and numerical results show that the proposed compliant mechanism offers a complex nonlinear dynamic behaviour and it can effectively act as a vibration absorber for a simple cantilever beam.