The need for new and better means of designing new structures and retrofitting existing ones from the damaging
effects of severe environmental loadings has motivated civil engineers to develop innovative simple concepts of
structural control to preserve the structural integrity of these buildings. One of the most effective concepts is the
use of a tuned mass damper (TMD) to reduce the undesirable vibrations and enhance the response of the
structure induced by wind or earthquake loads. The TMD is a passive energy absorbing device, consists of a
mass, spring and a viscous damper attached to the structure. This system has proved to be significant in
protecting environmental threats of large structures like towers, bridges and high rise buildings. Despite the fact
that the TMD system has been successfully used for high-rise buildings, it needs a huge mass and a large room
for installation at the top floor of the building, causing extra production cost and storage space problems. The
present study aims to apply this concept for ordinary low-rise buildings making use of part of the building as the
pendulum mass like water storage tanks located at top of the roof for these buildings. In this case the water tanks
should be hung from the topmost story girder forming a pendulum. The damper of this type needs neither
additional mass nor space because the building equipment is integrated into the damper. The study will develop
a simple analytical technique which may be used by the designers to find out the optimum parameters of TMD
that result in considerable reduction for the lateral vibrations. |
