Inerter-Connected Double Tuned Mass Damper for Passive Control of Buildings under Seismic Excitation

Abstract

In current work the Inerter-Connected Double Tuned Mass Damper (ICDTMD) is employed for structural control of a well-recognized benchmark 10-story linear shear building. The ICDTMD is introduced to overcome the practical limitations of the roof-top tuned mass damper inerter (TMDI), in which the second terminal of the inerter is connected to the lower floors of the building. To this end, a modification of the double tuned mass damper (DTMD) with a linking inerter is proposed to not only exploit the promising features of inerter but also surmount the architectural interference of the effective TMDI configurations. The TMDs free parameters are optimized using particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO) for two different single objective functions, i.e., the H_∞ norms of roof displacement and story drifts were minimized for robust tuning. To evaluate the robustness of the optimal damper, its performance was compared to a traditional roof-top single tuned mass damper (STMD) and DTMD in both frequency and time domains (time history analysis for four far- and near-field records) for different preselected mass and inertance ratios. The performance indices in the time domain were selected as the maximum story drifts, story acceleration and shear. Results show that the rooftop ICDTMD, unlike the rooftop TMDI, provides a similar level of response reduction as STMD, while being more reliable due to redundancy. In addition, the ICDTMD exhibits a similar level of response reduction as the DTMD with significantly smaller optimized spring stiffness.