Inertial mass damper for mitigating cable vibration

Stay cables used in cable-stayed bridges are prone to vibration due to their low-inherent damping characteristics. Many methods have been implemented in practice to mitigate such vibration. Recently, negative stiffness dampers have gained attention because of their promising energy dissipation ability. The viscous inertial mass damper (VIMD) has been shown to have properties similar to negative stiffness dampers. This paper examines the potential of the VIMD to enhance the damping, and mitigate the vibration, of stay cables. First, a control-oriented model of the cable is employed to formulate a system level model of the cable–VIMD system for small in-plane motion. After carefully classifying and labeling the mode order, the modal characteristics of the system are analyzed, and the optimal damper parameters for the several lower frequency modes are determined numerically. The results show that the achievable modal damping ratio can be up to nearly an order of magnitude larger than that of the traditional linear viscous damper; note that the optimal parameters of the VIMD are distinct for each mode of interest. These results are further validated through analysis of the cable responses due to the distributed sinusoidal excitation. Finally, a case study is conducted for a cable with a length of 307 m, including the design of practical damper parameters, modal-damping enhancement, and vibration mitigation under wind loads. The results show that the VIMD is a promising practical passive damper that possesses greater energy dissipation capacity than the traditional viscous damper for such cable–damper systems.