Experimental study on a new damping device for mitigation of structural vibrations under harmonic excitation

Abstract

This manuscript introduces a new damping device which is composed of a water tank and a pendulum. The new damping device can be tuned to multiple frequencies. In addition, it has a higher energy dissipation capacity when compared with the conventional Tuned Liquid Dampers (TLDs). In order to evaluate the efficiency of this new damping device a series of free vibration and forced vibration tests were conducted on a scaled down single-story one-bay steel frame. Two different configurations were studied for the mass of the pendulum that included a completely and a partially submerged mass. It was observed that the completely submerged configuration led to 44% higher damping ratio when compared with the conventional TLD. In addition, the completely submerged configuration reduced the peak displacement response of the structure 1.6 times more than the conventional TLD. The peak acceleration response of the structure equipped with the new damping device was reduced twice more than the conventional TLD. It was also found that, when the excitation frequency is lower than the resonance frequency, the conventional TLD performs better than the partially submerged configuration of the new damping device.