Vibration control of high-rise buildings using Distributed Multiple Tuned Mass Dampers

As a single TMD can be tuned regarding to a single frequency, using a single TMD for controlling the vibrations in a high-rise building, would limit its performance under earthquakes because of:

(1) wide frequency content of the earthquakes,

(2) low frequency value of higher modes in the high-rise buildings.

In order to improve the performance of the TMDs in vibration control of high-rise buildings, this rese

arch studies the optimum arrangement and prop- erties of the TMDs in a high-rise building during earthquake excitations. For this purpose, a 76 story benchmark high-rise building is investigated under four scaled earthquake excitations and Non-dominated Sorting Multi Objective Ge- netic Algorithm (NSGA II) is utilized as optimization method for studying the optimum properties and arrangement of the TMDs.

The results show that under some earthquake excitations, distributing the multiple tuned mass dampers over the height of the building would be more effective comparing to placing a single TMD on the roof level with the equal mass and optimum properties.

Tuned Mass Dampers (TMDs) are known as robust control systems for mitigating wind and earthquake effects on structures. As a passive control system, the advantage of using these systems is that they do not require the external power supply, additional control mechanism or tools such as computers and sensors. This provides more feasibility for these systems compared to active or semi active control systems.

The design parameters of an TMD include its damping, tuning frequency, and mass. Generally, the ratio of these parameters to the corresponding values of the structure is more important and utilized in the design procedures.