Employing Hybrid Tuned Mass Damper to Solve Off-Tuning Problems for Controlling Human Induced Vibration in Stadia

Abstract

A key objective in the design of any sports stadium is to include maximum number of spectators with minimum obstruction in the visual cone. This functional requirement often results in employing one or more cantilevered tiers, which in turn culminates in more slender grandstands often with relatively low natural frequencies and modal damping ratios. These natural frequencies may sometimes fall in the range of frequencies of human movement which can possibly excite the structure in resonance resulting in vibration serviceability issues. One of the available techniques to reduce excessive responses is to use passive vibration control techniques such as Tuned Mass Dampers (TMD). However, the off-tuning problem is a substantial drawback of this technique, whereby changes in natural frequencies caused by crowdstructure interaction may detune the TMDs. This paper presents a study into the possibility of using hybrid (combination of active and passive control) technology to augment the vibration serviceability of sports stadia. It shows a comparative analysis of vibration mitigation performances that are likely to be attained by utilising a passive TMD and the proposed HTMD. An appropriate control scheme is utilised with the proposed HTMD to deal with the off-tuning issues in TMDs caused by crowd loading, and is shown to be effective.

Experimental investigation of dynamic performance of a prototype hybrid tuned mass damper under human excitation

“…Herein, the authors have analytically and experimentally investigated the HTMD proposed in [14] and [15]. This is the performance of the Hybrid Tuned Mass Damper in comparison with passive TMD to reduce the structural response in addition to dealing with off-tuning issues.…”

“…As was shown in [13,[18][19][20][21][22][23][24], the acceleration of the primary structure as the driving force and velocity of the TMD as the active damping force of the HTMD are two essential direct response feedback signals to improve the performance of the HTMD. Also, it was shown in [14] that the displacement and acceleration of the TMD are two feedback signals which can be used for adaptive tuning of the HTMD to deal with the problem of off-tuning of a passive TMD.…”