Seismic response of controlled structures with active multiple tuned mass dampers

Active multiple tuned mass dampers （referred to as AMTMD）, which consist of several active tuned mass dampers （ATMDs） with identical stiffness and damping coefficients but varying mass and control force, have recently been proposed to suppress undesirable oscillations of structures under ground acceleration. It has been shown that the AMTMD can remarkably improve the performance of multiple tuned mass dampers （MTMDs） and is also more effective in reducing structure oscillation than single ATMDs. Notwithstanding this, good performance of AMTMD （including a single ATMD illustrated from frequency-domain analysis） may not necessarily translate into a good seismic reduction behavior in the time-domain. To investigate these phenomena, a three-story steel structure model controlled by AMTMD with three ATMDs was implemented in SIMULINK and subjected to several historical earthquakes. Likewise, the structure under consideration was assumed to have uncertainty of stiffness, such as 4-15% of its initial stiffness, in the numerical simulations. The optimum design parameters of the AMTMD were obtained in the frequency-domain by implementing the minimization of the minimum values of the maximum dynamic magnification factors （DMF） of general structures with AMTMD. For comparison purposes, response analysis of the same structure with a single ATMD was also performed. The numerical analysis and comparison show that the AMTMD generally renders better effectiveness when compared with a single ATMD for structures subjected to historical earthquakes. In particular, the AMTMD can improve the effectiveness of a single ATMD for a structure with an uncertainty of stiffness of 4-15% of its initial stiffness.     

Active multiple tuned mass dampers for structures under the ground acceleration

Active multiple tuned mass dampers (AMTMD) consisting of many active tuned mass dampers (ATMDs) with a uniform distribution of natural frequencies have been, for the first time, proposed for attenuating undesirable vibrations of a structure under the ground acceleration.The multiple tuned mass dampers (MTMD) in the AMTMD is manufactured by keeping the stiffness and damping constant and varying the mass. The control forces in the AMTMD are generated through keeping the identical displacement and velocity feedback gain and varying the acceleration feedback gain. The structure is represented by its mode‐generalized system in the specific vibration mode being controlled using the mode reduced‐order method. The optimum parameters of the AMTMD are investigated to delineate the influence of the important parameters on the effectiveness and robustness of the AMTMD by conducting a numerical searching technique. The parameters include the frequency spacing, average damping ratio, tuning frequency ratio, total number and normalized acceleration feedback gain coefficient. The criterion, which can be stated as the minimization of the minimum values of the maximum dynamic magnification factors (i.e. Min.Min.Max.DMF), is chosen for the optimum searching. Additionally, for the sake of comparison, the results of the optimum MTMD (the passive counterpart of AMTMD) and ATMD are also taken into account in the present paper. It is demonstrated that the proposed AMTMD can be expected to significantly reduce the oscillations of structures under the ground acceleration. It is also shown that the AMTMD can remarkably improve the performance of the MTMD and has higher effectiveness than ATMD. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.