Optimal tuned mass-damper-inerter (TMDI) design in wind-excited tall buildings for occupants’ comfort serviceability performance and energy harvesting

Abstract

The tuned mass-damper-inerter (TMDI) couples the classical tuned mass-damper (TMD), with an inerter device developing a resisting force proportional to the relative acceleration of its ends by the "inertance" constant. Previous works demonstrated that the inclusion of the TMDI leads to more efficient broadband vibration control for a range of different structures under different actions. This paper proposes a novel optimal TMDI design formulation to address occupants' comfort in wind-excited slender tall buildings susceptible to vortex shedding (VS) effects and to explore optimal TMDI's potential for transforming part of the windinduced kinetic energy to usable electricity in tall buildings. Attention is focused on investigating benefits of TMDIs with different inertial properties (i.e., secondary mass/weight and inertance) configured in different topologies defined by the number of floors spanned by the inerter device to connect the secondary mass to the building structure. Optimally designed TMDIs for a wide range of inertial properties and three different topologies are obtained through numerical solution of the underlying optimization problem for a benchmark 305.9m tall building with more than 6 height-to-width ratio subjected to experimentally calibrated spatiallycorrelated across-wind force field accounting for VS effects. Performance-based design (PBD) graphs on the TMDI inertial (mass-inertance) plane are furnished demonstrating that any fixed structural performance level in terms of occupants' comfort (i.e., peak top floor acceleration) can be achieved through lightweight TMDIs if compared with classical TMDs as long as sufficient inertance is provided. Further, TMDI robustness to host structure properties and to reference wind velocity is shown to increase by increasing inertance or by spanning more floors in connecting the secondary mass with the host structure by the inerter. Lastly, it is found that increased available energy for harvesting in wind excited tall buildings is achieved by incorporating electromagnetic motors in TMDIs with varying damping property, while concurrent reduced floor acceleration and increased available energy for harvesting is accomplished by TMDI topologies with inerters spanning more floors.

Top-Story Softening for Enhanced Mitigation of Vortex Shedding-Induced Vibrations in Wind-Excited Tuned Mass Damper Inerter-Equipped Tall Buildings

“…This improvement becomes more significant for increased top-storey flexibility and for reduced attached mass, that is, TMDI RF curves are more spaced out as top-storey stiffness reduces and/or μ decreases. Notably, these trends confirm results reported in the literature for the case of a high-rise 74-storey wind-excited building (Petrini et al 2020) as well as for seismically excited low-to-mid-rise buildings with optimal TMDIs Taflanidis 2018, Ruiz et al 2018). Fig.…”

Distributed Passive Actuation Schemes for Seismic Protection of Multibuilding Systems

“…After the positive results obtained in the present work, we believe that further research effort should be invested in obtaining a deeper understanding of the problem and removing some of the model simplifications introduced in this paper. In that sense, some lines of particular interest include the usage of inerter-based vibration absorbers [36,37], the study of the effects of interstory and interbuilding velocities on the multibulding damper allocation problem [38,39], the analysis of the effects produced by soil-structure interaction [40] and seismic-wave propagation [41] on large multibulding problems, and the formulation of extended design strategies for elastic-plastic structures [42] and/or nonlinear damping devices [43].…”

“…wherer j i (t), a j i (t) andr j i (t) are the output variables defined in Equations (33), (37) and (40), respectively, and T w denotes the total duration of the seismic disturbance. The obtained interstory-drift peak-values are presented in Figure 9.…”

Design, Dimensioning and Simulation of Inerters for the Reduction of Vehicle Wheel Vibrations—Case Studies

“…The research of Marian and Giaralies [5] concentrated on the vibration control of chain-like structural systems employing inerters, and the research of Sun et al [6] dealt with cable-stayed bridges. Current developments and investigations, which are not application specific, include inerters which employ a continuous velocity transmission (CVT) for changing the inertance [7], the influence of inerters on the natural frequencies of vibrating systems [8], an inverse screw transmission for the two-terminal manipulation of a flywheel [9], planetary flywheel inerters [10], variable inertia flywheels in power hydraulic systems [11] and tuned mass-damper-inerters for, amongst others things, energy harvesting [12,13].…”