Citation:
Emiliano Matta, Rosario Ceravolo, Alessandro De Stefano, Antonino Quattrone and Luca Zanotti Fragonara. Tuned mass dampers for the mitigation of impulsive ground motions. 11th International Conference on Computational Structures Technology 2012 (CST 2012), 4-7 September 2012, Dubrovnik, Croatia.
Abstract:
The performance of tuned mass dampers (TMDs) diminishes as the input duration
shortens. As a result, they are not recommended for use against short-duration,
pulse-like ground motions, such as those occurring in near-field (NF) zones in the
presence of forward-directivity or fling-step effects. Yet a systematic assessment of
this control loss is still missing. In this paper, a recent analytical model of ground
motion pulses is applied to the design and evaluation of TMDs against impulsive
earthquakes. Based on this model, first a new optimization method is introduced as
an alternative to the classical H∞ approach. Then the two strategies are tested on
single- and multi- degrees-of-freedom linear structures subject both to analytical
pulses and to a large set of NF records possessing pulse-like features. The resulting
statistical evaluation, expressed by percentile response spectra, shows the
advantages and disadvantages of a pulse-oriented TMD design, and improves the
general understanding of TMDs effectiveness under impulsive ground motions.
