Optimal design and assessment of tuned mass damper inerter with nonlinear viscous damper in seismically excited multi-storey buildings

Abstract

In recent years, the tuned mass damper inerter (TMDI) has been demonstrated in several theoretical studies to be an effective vibration absorber for the seismic protection of non-isolated buildings. Its effectiveness relies on careful tuning of the TMDI stiffness and damping properties, while its performance improves with the increase of the inertance property which is readily scalable. Nevertheless, in all previous studies, the energy dissipative TMDI element has been modelled by a linear viscous damper. Still, commercial viscous dampers display a nonlinear velocity-dependent power law behavior. In this regard, this paper investigates, for the first time in literature, the potential of the TMDI fitted with nonlinear viscous damper (NVD) for seismic response protection of multi-storey buildings. This is supported by an efficient optimal nonlinear TMDI (NTMDI) tuning approach which accounts for any absorber connectivity to the building structure and employs statistical linearization to treat the nonlinear damping term. For the special case of white-noise excited undamped buildings, optimal NTMDI tuning is derived analytically in closed-form which is shown to be sufficiently accurate for lightly damped structures. Comprehensive numerical data are presented to delineate trends of optimal NVD damping coefficient with the NVD power-law exponent and the inertance. Further, nonlinear response history analysis results pertaining to optimally tuned NTMDI application for a benchmark 9-storey steel structure demonstrate that reduced NTMDI stroke and inerter force can be achieved with negligible change in storey drifts and floor acceleration performance by adopting lower NVD exponent values, leading to practically beneficial NTMDI deployments.

Optimal tuning and assessment of non-grounded regenerative tuned mass damper inerter (RE-TMDI) configurations for concurrent motion control and energy harvesting

“…1b) increases by increasing the distance between the two locations (e.g. spanning several floors in multi-storey buildings) [16,17], or by implementing either local structural modifications to the primary structure (e.g. creating soft floors in multi-storey buildings) [18,19] or global primary structure shaping aiming for increased modal curvature [20].…”

Preface for the special issue on advances on inerter-based seismic protection of structures

“…In this regard, develops a semi-analytical method for optimal design of multiple TVMDs in multi-storey buildings to achieve a pre-specified (targeted) displacement performance. Further, Rajana et al (2022) develops a practicable method for optimal TMDI design with nonlinear viscous dampers in multi-storey buildings and numerically assesses the influence of such a nonlinearity vis-à-vis the linear TMDI using a benchmark 9-storey steel moment resisting frame. Moreover, Patsialis et al (2021) contributes a numerical bi-objective IVA design framework for multi-storey hysteretic buildings whereby the peak IVA force assuming linear device behavior and the consequence of critical engineering demands parameters (such as storey-drifts and floor accelerations) exceeding predefined design thresholds are taken as the objectives of the optimization problem.…”