Vibration control has always been of great interest for many researchers in different fields, especially mechanical and civil engineering. One of the key elements in control of vibration is damper. One way of optimally suppressing unwanted vibrations is to find the best locations of the dampers in the structure, such that the highest dampening effect is achieved. This paper proposes a new approach that turns the conventional discrete optimization problem of optimal damper placement to a continuous topology optimization. In fact, instead of considering a few dampers and run the discrete optimization problem to find their best locations, the whole structure is considered to be connected to infinite numbers of dampers and level set topology optimization will be performed to determine the optimal damping set, while certain number of dampers are used, and the minimum energy for the system is achieved. This method has a few major advantages over the conventional methods, and can handle damper placement problem for complicated structures (systems) more accurately. The results, obtained in this research are very promising and show the capability of this method in finding the best damper location is structures.
Efficient optimization method for finding minimum energy paths of magnetic transitions
