Investigation of a monostable nonlinear vibration isolator with the inertia-elastic boundary

This paper proposes a new monostable nonlinear vibration isolator with the inertia-elastic boundary (IEB-MVI), and thoroughly investigates its performance and nonlinear dynamic behaviors. The theoretical model of IEB-MVI for vibration isolation is derived and experimentally validated. To show the vibration isolation performance improvement, the comparison study is performed between the IEB-MVI, a linear isolator and a monostable isolator without the inertia-elastic boundary (IEB). Results show that the EB-MVI can abate the resonant vibration response by 4.93 dB in the low-frequency band and widen the effective isolation bandwidth by 35.2 % compared to the monostable isolator without the EB; both the IEB-MVI and the monostable counterpart achieve the same broadband vibration isolation performance in the high-frequency band, which is significantly better than that achieved by the linear isolator. This indicates the benefit of the IEB for performance improvement of the monostable isolator. Next, the influence of the different IEB parameters on the performance is comprehensively studied. Finally, the study analyzes the bifurcation characteristics of the IEB-MVI, which develops insight into the isolator's nonlinear dynamic behaviors.