Random vibration analysis of nonlinear structure with viscoelastic nonlinear energy sink

Most engineering structures serve in complex and harsh dynamic environments and suffer from nonlinear vibrations generated by random excitations such as strong winds and waves, which need to be mitigated. To this end, a novel viscoelastic nonlinear energy sink (VNES) device is proposed for the vibration control of structures, whereby the random vibration of a nonlinear oscillator with a VNES device is analyzed in this paper. Specifically, the mathematical model of the structure-VNES is formulated. An approximate technique for the treatment of viscoelastic damping element modeled by the fractional derivative is developed, whereby an equivalent nonlinear system without fractional derivative is derived. The averaged Itô equations associated with the amplitude envelopes are then obtained by resorting to the stochastic averaging method. The closed-form solution of the stationary response is solved from the Fokker–Planck–Kolmogorov (FPK) equation and verified by the Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) data simultaneously. The effects of system parameters and noise intensity on the stationary response are sequentially examined. By comparing the VNES system to the case without attachment and one equipped with the commonly used tuned mass damper (TMD) device, the performance and robustness of the VNES are highlighted. The conclusions of this work may contribute to the efficacy of the application of the VNES in practice.