Tuned Mass Damper Vibration Analysis

For my senior design project, I was in charge of analyzing and characterizing the effect of a Tuned Mass Damper (TMD) coupled with an Instron ElectroPuls e10000 fatigue testing machine. The Instron ElectroPuls had been exhibiting a large amount of unwanted vibration that was being transmitted through the floor, so our team designed, fabricated, and tested TMDs to reduce the unwanted noise and vibration.

​

The TMD was qualitatively successful in reducing noise and vibrations. To quantitatively evaluate the performance of the device, I used an Arduino paired with an ADXL345 Accelerometer to characterize and analyze the resulting vibrations. In MATLAB, I analyzed the resulting acceleration signal from the accelerometer with a Fast Fourier Transform and compared the dominant frequencies and amplitudes between tests with and without the tuned mass damper.