Shaking table tests on a SDOF structure with cylindrical and rectangular TLDs having rotatable baffles

Abstract

Control of vibrations against extraordinary excitations such as wind and earthquake is very important to the protection of life and financial concerns. One of the methods of structural control is to use Tuned Liquid Damper (TLD), however due to the nature of TLD only one sloshing frequency can be created when the water is sloshing. Among various ideas proposed to compensate this problem, by changing the angle of some rotatable baffles embedded inside a TLD, a frequency range is created such that these baffles are tuned manually at different frequencies. In this study, the effect of cross sectional shape of container with rotating baffles on seismic behavior of TLD is experimentally studied. For this purpose, rectangular and cylindrical containers are designed and used to suppress the vibrations of a Single Degree-Of-Freedom (SDOF) structure under harmonic and earthquake excitations considering three baffle angles. The results show that the rectangular-shaped damper reduces the structural response in all load cases more than the damper with a cylindrical shape, such that maximum differences of two dampers to reduce the structural displacement and structural acceleration are 5.5% and 3% respectively, when compared to the cases where no baffles are employed.