Investigation of vibration mitigation of stay cables incorporated with superelastic shape memory alloy dampers

This paper addresses the vibration mitigation of stay cables by using superelastic shape memory alloy (SMA) dampers. A closed form solution of the additional equivalent modal damping ratio of a combined stay cable/SMA damper system is formulated when the combined stay cable/SMA damper system vibrates with a single mode. The responses of a stay cable model on a cable-stayed bridge model with/without one SMA damper subjected to sweeping sinusoidal excitations are numerically investigated. An experimental investigation on the stay cable model incorporated with superelastic SMA spring dampers is finally carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach and the computational results.