An innovative type of tuned liquid damper

Abstract

This paper introduces a new type of Tuned Sloshing Damper (TSD) having a relatively simple, easy-to-model behavior and capable of effectively controlling earthquake vibrations. It consists of a traditional TSD with addition of a floating roof. Since the roof is much stiffer than water, it prevents wave breaking, hence making the response linear even at large amplitudes. The roof also facilitates the incorporation of supplemental devices (either passive, semi-active or active) with which the level of vibration suppression can be substantially augmented. This new proposed TSD, from now on denoted as Tuned Liquid Damper with Floating Roof (TLD-FR), maintains the traditional advantages of TSD (low cost, easy installation and tuning) but its numerical characterization is much simpler because the floating roof only allows one degree of freedom performance. An efficient numerical scheme, based on potential flow in which its dynamic behavior is expressed as a second order lineal system of equations, is discussed for the modeling of the TLD-FR. Preliminary results reveal that structures with TLD-FR can achieve significant reductions in their seismic response. This reduction is sensitive to the design characteristics of the TLD-FR, the fundamental frequency and the introduced damping. The overall study shows that the TLD-FR is an efficient alternative to reduce seismic responses on structures offering low cost, and easy-to-model and tune behavior.