Practical negative stiffness device with viscoelastic damper in parallel or series configuration for cable damping improvement

Negative stiffness mechanism has been found able to improve damping performance of dampers on a stay cable which otherwise is limited by the damper installation distance from a cable end. This study provides a practical negative stiffness device (NSD) with adjustable negative stiffness and experiments are performed to validate the negative stiffness effect. The NSD is then combined with a viscoelastic damper in parallel or series for cable damping improvement. Explicit design formulas are derived for optimal design with a target enhancement effect in damping considering the damper described respectively using the Kelvin model and the linear hysteretic damping model. The formulas are verified by analytical and numerical solutions. Parametric analyses show damping enhancement effects of the NSD and it is found more efficient when combined with a damper in series because both deformation amplitudes of the damper and the NSD are further increased in this configuration. Subsequently, case studies are carried out based on two cables of the Sutong Bridge respectively with a shear-type viscous damper and a high damping rubber damper. The results show that the designed NSD can fulfill practical requirements. Particularly, a 100% increase in damping can be achieved by the presented NSD when combined with the damper installed on a cable of 546.9 m long.