Forced harmonic vibrations of multi-span Euler-Bernoulli beams carrying spring-damper-mass systems

A spring-damper-mass system can be used as a passive vibration absorber, which can reduce the vibration amplitudes of a system at certain frequencies or in a broad band. In this paper, a highly efficient computational method called Numerical Assembly Technique (NAT) is extended to vibration problems of beams under arbitrarily distributed loads carrying spring-damper-mass systems, to identify the optimal set of parameters of the passive vibration absorbers. The method is quasi-analytical in the sense that the governing equations are fulfilled exactly and only minor numerical errors due to double-precision arithmetic are introduced in the boundary and interface conditions.