Seismic response control with inelastic tuned mass dampers

Abstract

An elasto-plastic spring is utilized in a tuned mass damper (TMD) with eliminating its viscous damper to establish a new seismic response control system. A novel method to find the most appropriate parameters of the proposed elasto-plastic TMD (P-TMD) including its initial stiffness/frequency and yield strength is presented so as to reduce the seismic response of the main system with the P-TMD to a level of that obtained with a previously suggested optimum TMD. The parameters are used to compute the responses of several main structures in the form of single-degree of freedom systems with the proposed P-TMD under different earthquake excitations. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed device and tuning method, maximum displacements and accelerations are compared to those of optimum TMD systems as well as those obtained from uncontrolled ones. The numerical results show that the proposed device, when using the introduced procedure for selecting its design parameters, reduces the seismic responses significantly and can be used instead of the optimum TMD without the need for a viscous damper.