Human body inspired vibration isolation: Beneficial nonlinear stiffness, nonlinear damping & nonlinear inertia

This paper investigates, for the first time, a human body inspired anti-vibration structure (HBIAVS) for exploring its vibration isolation potential. The anti-vibration structure HBIAVS consists of an X-shaped supporting structure to simulate legs of human body and a rotational unit with mass to mimic rotational motion of arms and upper body during human walking. The nonlinear property of the HBIAVS can obviously improve the vibration isolation at low frequencies and/or in a broadband frequency range. With mathematical modeling, the influence incurred by different structural parameters on system isolation performance is systematically studied. It is revealed for the first time that, the HBIAVS has passive and very beneficial nonlinear stiffness, nonlinear damping and nonlinear inertia simultaneously and it can achieve a tunable ultra-low resonant frequency and an advantageous anti-resonance characteristic. All these beneficial properties are adjustable with respect to structural parameters, compared with other benchmark vibration isolation systems and validated by experimental results. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.