OPTIMAL DAMPER POSITIONING IN BEAMS FOR MINIMUM DYNAMIC COMPLIANCE

The purpose of this paper is to propose an efficient and systematic pr ocedure for finding the optimal damper positioning to minimize the dyn amic compliance of a cantilever beam. The dynamic compliance is expres sed in terms of the amplitude of a transfer function of the tip deflec tion evaluated at one of the undamped natural frequencies. The dynamic compliance is minimized subject to a constraint on the sum of the dam ping coefficients of added dampers. Optimality criteria are derived an d the optimal damper positioning is determined via a new steepest dire ction search algorithm. Due to employment of a general dynamical prope rty, i.e. the amplitude of a transfer function, the results are genera l and are not influenced by characteristics of disturbances. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science S.A.