Feasibility Study on Building Mass Damper for Seismic Design

Feasibility Study on Building Mass Damper for Seismic Design

A tuned mass damper(TMD) has been recognized as an effective energy absorbing device to reduce undesirable vibrations of an attached primary system subjected to harmonic excitations. Its design concept is to generate a phase lag attributed to resonance between the primary system and the TMD. In this study, the use of a partial structural mass, instead of an additional mass, to be an energy absorber, i.e. building mass damper(BMD), is discussed to seismically protect both the primary structure and building mass absorber. Taking appropriate mass ratios and objective functions into consideration, a simplified three-lumped-mass structure model, in which each of the three lumped masses is assigned to the building mass absorber, control layer and primary structure, is employed to derive the optimal design parameters for BMD. The practicability of BMD, as well as the effectiveness of the proposed optimal design method, is numerically verified using several recorded earthquakes that possess significantly different characteristics.