Vibration Protection of a Famous Statue against Ambient and Earthquake Excitation Using A Tuned Inerter–Damper

This paper deals with the performance analysis of a vibration-isolation system for Michelangelo Buonarroti’s famous Ronadanini Pietà statue based on the monitoring and analysis of vibration signals. A tuned mass-damper–inerter is introduced in order to increase the effectiveness of the isolator in the horizontal direction. Specifically, a multi-degree-of-freedom (MDOF) model for the system, including non-linear terms, is proposed. The monitoring data of the structure inside the museum were utilized to update the MDOF model of this structure. Then, the effect of different parameters was analysed, and some modifications proposed to enhance the efficiency of the isolation system in its working condition. A combination of tuned mass-dampers (TMD) with an inerter is proposed to attain a considerable increase in the performance of the isolation system based on the main feature of the tuned mass-damper–inerter (TMDI), which can apply high apparent mass to a system without adding considerable real mass to the original system. Various performance functions are used to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed TMDI. It is shown that a significant effect of this passive method is to reduce the level of vibration in the updated model of this sensitive and valuable object.