Adjustable and Robust X-Absorber

An important application of nonlinear damping is to be used in a nonlinear absorber. Nonlinear damping has been shown its advantages in vibration isolation and the X-nonlinear damping of last chapter is also shown its benefits and very special nonlinear features. It is quite known that, for a given known master structure, an optimized nonlinear absorber has no obvious advantages over its linear counterparts in terms of the vibration suppression performance. Then, the big question is what advantages a specially designed X-absorber could provide. The study of this chapter is to answer this question in a very comprehensive and in-depth way. It is shown that the X-absorber is more robust to parametric changes including model parametric changes and excitation (frequency and amplitude) changes, and also more robust to inherent nonlinearities of master structures.