Vibration control has been of great interest to scientists and engineers for many years. Although linear vibration absorbers have been shown to be effective in mitigating vibrations at specific frequencies, their vibration reduction effect is usually limited to a narrow frequency bandwidth. Nonlinear energy sinks have attracted attention due to their better vibration reduction effect over a wider frequency bandwidth. In practical applications, the nonlinear energy sink devices can effectively absorb, dissipate, and convert energy from broadband excitation, so as to achieve vibration reduction and energy harvesting. However, research on energy harvesting based on the nonlinear energy sink is less mature than in linear systems. Multiple parameters of device design (e.g., damping size) affect the actual performance of the nonlinear energy sinks, but there is no exact method to simplify the design of the multiparameter nonlinear energy sinks. Since it is more difficult to implement electromagnetic and electrostatic energy harvesters, more research has focused on piezoelectric energy harvesters. This paper summarizes the research on the nonlinear energy sink and energy harvesting technology, including the introduction of the nonlinear energy sink, energy harvesting based on the nonlinear energy sink, and its application in various fields of energy harvesting. The paper also summarizes some important methods for solving the dynamical equations, as well as their advantages and disadvantages. The conclusions provide an outlook on the subsequent research of the nonlinear energy sink technology, such as the introduction of piezoelectric materials with high energy density, the benefits of balanced vibration suppression and harvesting of vibration energy, and the self‐tuning of parameters in complex environments. It provides a powerful reference for the popularization and application of energy harvesting technology based on nonlinear energy sinks.

Under the effect of strong earthquakes, collisions or excessive inter-story displacements may occur between adjacent building structures to the extent that the building structure is damaged. The traditional seismic measures for these structures can no longer meet the needs in practical engineering. In this paper, we propose the application of parallel and serial TID-based control systems in adjacent buildings as an example of a single-story adjacent building, and use it to form a new adjacent building seismic reduction structure. In this paper, the dynamic characteristics and design parameter optimization of the vibration control system are investigated by means of the Monte Carlo pattern search method and H₂ norm theory. The results show that the introduction of serial and parallel TID in adjacent building structures can effectively improve the seismic resistance of adjacent buildings. The problem of vibration amplification caused by resonance is obviously improved, which is especially evident in the adjacent building structure vibration control system based on parallel TID. The vibration control system of adjacent building structures based on parallel TID is more robust. When optimizing the right building, the damping requirement of the TID decreases for the vibration control system based on parallel TID as the adjacent building mass ratio increases, while the damping requirement of the TID increases for the vibration control system based on serial TID. In both vibration control systems, the difference in the optimal inertial mass ratio is small. In practice, a moderate increase in the difference between adjacent building masses can have a positive effect on the vibration control performance of the systems. The main contribution of this paper is to fill the research gap in parallel and serial TID applications for adjacent building vibration reduction.