Optimal Design of Dampers for Multi-Mode Cable Vibration Control Based on Genetic Algorithm

Cables in cable-stayed bridges are subjected to the problem of multi-mode vibrations. Particularly, the first ten modes of long cables can have a frequency less than 3[Formula: see text]Hz and hence are vulnerable to wind-rain induced vibrations. In practice, mechanical dampers are widely used to mitigate such cable vibrations and thus they have to be designed to provide sufficient damping for all the concerned vibration modes. Meanwhile, the behaviors of practical dampers are complicated and better to be described by mechanical models with many parameters. Furthermore, additional mechanical components such as inerters and negative stiffness devices have been proposed to enhance the damper performance on cables. Therefore, it is increasingly difficult to optimize the damper parameters for suppressing multi-mode cable vibrations. To address this issue, this study proposes a novel damper design method based on the genetic algorithm (GA). The procedure of the method is first introduced where the damper performance optimization is formulated as a single-objective multi-parameter optimization problem. The effectiveness of the method is then verified by considering a viscous damper on a stay cable. Subsequently, the method is applied to optimize three typical dampers for cable vibration control, i.e. the positive stiffness damper, the negative stiffness damper, and the viscous inertial mass damper. The results show that the GA-based method is effective and efficient for cable damper design to achieve best multi-mode control effect and it is particularly useful for dampers with more parameters.