Modified Adaptive Negative Stiffness Device with Variable Negative Stiffness and Geometrically Nonlinear Damping for Seismic Protection of Structures

Adaptive negative stiffness device is one of the promising seismic protection devices since it can generate seismic isolation effect through negative stiffness when it is mostly needed and achieve similar vibration mitigation as a semi-active control device. However, the adaptive negative stiffness device generally combined with linear viscous damping underpins the drawback of degrading the vibration isolation effect during the high-frequency region. In this paper, a modified adaptive negative stiffness device (MANSD) with the ability to provide both lateral negative stiffness and nonlinear damping by configuring linear springs and linear viscous dampers is proposed to address the above issue. The negative stiffness and nonlinear damping are realised through a linkage mechanism. The fundamentals and dynamic characteristics of a SDOF system with such a device are analyzed and formulated using the Harmonic Balance Method, with a special focus on the amplitude–frequency response and transmissibility of the system. The system with damping nonlinearity as a function of displacement and velocity has been proven to have attractive advantages over linear damping in reducing the transmissibility in the resonance region without increasing that in the high-frequency region. The effect of nonlinear damping on suppressing displacement and acceleration responses is numerically verified under different sinusoidal excitations and earthquakes with different intensities. Compared with linear damping, the MANSD with nonlinear damping could achieve additional reductions on displacement and acceleration under scaled earthquakes, especially intensive earthquakes.