Structural Control Using Modified Tuned Liquid Dampers

Abstract eng:
This paper presents a numerical study for structural control using a modified configuration of the tuned liquid damper (TLD), which is a passive damper consisting of a solid tank filled with water used for controlling vibration of structures. The TLD damper relies on the sloshing of water inside it to dissipate energy. One characteristic of TLDs is that energy dissipation is greater when water sloshing is more. This characteristic has been utilized to design the modified TLD configuration, in which the TLD, instead of being rigidly connected to the floor, is elevated using a rigid rod connected to the floor by an appropriately designed torsion spring. This increases the base acceleration seen by the TLD and also introduces an additional in phase rotational motion, which increases the sloshing of water, and makes the TLD more effective in controlling structural response to earthquake and wind loads. In this present investigation, rectangular TLDs have been taken and liquid sloshing has been modeled using shallow water theory. This shallow water modeling of liquid sloshing has been used to investigate the response of the structure under harmonic base motions, with the standard TLD configuration. Numerical results have been compared with available experimental results to validate the TLD numerical model. This validated model is then used to study the effectiveness of the modified TLD configuration. Obviously, as the torsion spring approaches infinite rigidity, the modified TLD and standard TLD are the same. It is seen that, for a given structure TLD configuration, there exists an optimum value of the rotational spring stiffness, which is reasonably excitation independent, for which the effectiveness of the modified TLD is maximum. Thus the modified TLD configuration can be more effective as a structural control device than the standard TLD configuration.

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