Application of Tuned Liquid Column Ball Damper (TLCBD) on Multi-Storey Steel Structures for Improved Dynamic Response

Abstract

Due to modern demands and limited land resources, the construction of high-rise buildings has increased in recent decades. As a structure's height grows, it becomes more susceptible to earthquake and wind-induced vibrations. Active, passive, and isolation damping mechanisms are among the latest methods used to manage structural vibrations. A tuned liquid column ball damper (TLCBD) is a passive control system that is used to control building movements caused by wind or earthquakes. TLCBD is an advance form of tuned liquid column damper (TLCD) with a spherical ball in the middle of the horizontal part of the U-shaped channel filled with liquid. The spherical ball serves as a moving orifice that improves the vibration mitigation effect in the TLCBD by providing resistance to water motion. This thesis presents the effects of TLCBD on steel diaphragm structure, taken as a multi degree of freedom (MDOF) system against unidirectional seismic loading. TLCBD was tuned with the fundamental natural frequency of the structure and placed on multiple stories of the primary structure for getting most optimized scenarios. For optimization three types of liquids were used including water, sugar solution and motor oil with steel ball. Via a series of shake table experiments, the efficacy of the TLCBD was investigated against arbitrary seismic loading which was very close to El Centro (1940). For performance assessment, the TLCBD acceleration response was measured for each case under all loading conditions and compared to a structure without TLCBD. The efficiency of the TLCBD is based on the type of liquid used in it along with its location on the structure.