Numerical modeling and experimental study on a novel pounding tuned mass damper

Abstract

Owing to its easy implementation and robustness, the pounding tuned mass damper (PTMD), which uses viscoelastic materials to cover the pounding boundary to increase the energy dissipation during impact, has been studied in recent years. The conventional PTMD design includes a gap between the pounding mass and the viscoelastic material; the value of this gap should be optimized. In this paper, a novel PTMD is proposed to control structural vibrations. In the proposed PTMD, the pounding boundary covered by viscoelastic materials is simply added to one side of the tuned mass when the tuned mass is in the equilibrium position. Unlike the conventional PTMD, the gap between the tuned mass and the pounding boundary is zero in the proposed design and is no longer a design parameter. A new analytic model is proposed to accurately predict the impact force between viscoelastic materials and steel. Through comparison with the impact force and the indentation from impact experiments, the accuracy of the proposed impact force model is validated. To verify the control performance of the proposed PTMD, an experimental study on a frame with the proposed PTMD is carried out to investigate the control performance in free vibration and forced vibration cases. Both experimental and numerical results show that the proposed PTMD can effectively reduce the response of the frame structure and that the damping ratio of the frame is significantly increased.