Structural design for vibration transfer suppression

This paper considers optimal design of frame structures for vibration suppression. The H_∞ norm of the transfer function from disturbance sources to the displacement outputs, which we want to suppress, is adopted as the objective function to represent the magnitude of vibration transfer. The design parameters are the cross-sectional areas of frame members. For minimization of the H_∞ norm under a constraint of the total weight, the sequential quadratic programming (SQP) method is employed. At each iteration, it takes very much time to compute the H_∞ norm of the transfer function if we use the full order model of the structure. Therefore, we employ a reduced order model, which is obtained by eliminating insignificant modes in the input-output relation. Examples are presented with experimental results to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed design method.