Control of vertical oscillations of a cable by a piecewise linear absorber

Design tools for fabrication of nonlinear (nonsmooth) passive absorbers for controlling vertical modes of taut cables are presented. The design takes into account the effects of the gravity and activation of the nonlinear absorber. In detail, the slow invariant manifold of the system is tuned which lead to design of the absorber. The paper is followed by several numerical and experimental results showing the efficiency of such nonsmooth absorbers in controlling targeted vertical modes of cables.