Clipped viscous damping with negative stiffness for semi-active cable damping

This paper investigates numerically and experimentally clipped viscous damping with negative stiffness for semi-active cable damping. From simulations it is concluded that unclipped and clipped viscous damping with negative stiffness is equivalent to unclipped and clipped LQR. It is shown that optimized unclipped viscous damping with negative stiffness generates critical cable damping by an anti-node at the actuator position. The resulting curvature at the actuator position is larger than the curvature close to the anchors due to the disturbance forces which may lead to premature cable fatigue at the actuator position. Optimized clipped viscous damping with negative stiffness does not show this drawback, can be implemented using a semi-active damper and produces twice as much cable damping as optimal viscous damping. Close to the optimal tuning, it leads to approximately the same control force as optimal semi-active friction damping with negative stiffness, which explains the superior cable damping. The superior damping results from the negative stiffness that increases the damper motion. Clipped viscous damping with negative stiffness is validated on a strand cable with a magneto-rheological damper. The measured cable damping is twice that achieved by emulated viscous damping, which confirms the numerical results. A tuning rule for clipped viscous damping with negative stiffness of real cables with flexural rigidity is given.