Low Temperature Influence on the Behavior of Viscoelastic Layer of the Pounding Tuned Mass Damper

In previous studies, the pounding tuned mass damper (PTMD) has been successfully demonstrated to mitigate the undesired vibration of a variety of structures at room temperature. The advantages of the PTMD over the traditional tuned mass damper (TMD) has been verified through theoretical analysis and experimental investigations. However, the PTMD relies on an impact layer made of viscoelastic material to improve its vibration control performance and robustness against detuning effect. The energy dissipation of the viscoelastic material can be affected by the changes of environmental temperature. Therefore, this paper aims to study the impact damping behavior of the viscoelastic material in the low temperature environment of the sea bed where the PTMD is expected to control vibrations of subsea pipelines. The experimental apparatus fabricated in the previous study to generate and measure the lateral impact was housed inside a refrigerator. The experimental results indicate that the pounding stiffness decreased whereas the energy dissipation increased in the low temperature environment. Moreover, an impact fatigue test was also performed in the low temperature environment and compared with the room temperature case. Experimental results from a previous study show that the viscoelastic material was damaged after 36,000 cycles of impacts in the room temperature and a cyclic hardening–softening process was observed. However, in the low temperature environment, the viscoelastic material was damaged after 50,000 cycles of impacts and the cyclic hardening–softening process was not observed. As the impact cycle grew, the pounding stiffness decreased from 53,000 N/m(1.5) to 17,000 N/m(1.5) and the energy dissipation increased from 46.12 J/m per cycle to 65.4 J/m per cycle.