Optimal damper positioning in beams for minimum dynamic compliance Original Research Article

The purpose of this paper is to propose an efficient and systematic procedure for finding the optimal damper positioning to minimize the dynamic compliance of a cantilever beam. The dynamic compliance is expressed in terms of the amplitude of a transfer function of the tip deflection evaluated at one of the undamped natural frequencies. The dynamic compliance is minimized subject to a constraint on the sum of the damping coefficients of added dampers. Optimality criteria are derived and the optimal damper positioning is determined via a new steepest direction search algorithm. Due to employment of a general dynamical property, i.e. the amplitude of a transfer function, the results are general and are not influenced by characteristics of disturbances.