Bioinspired Tuned Mass Damper for Mitigation of Wind-Induced Building Excitation

This paper presents a novel bioinspired actuator that mimics the sacrificial bond and hidden length mechanism, a highly efficient energy dissipation mechanism found in bio-organisms such as abalone shell and bone. The effectiveness of the bioinspired actuator implemented in a tuned mass damper application is investigated with illustrative examples. As a basic and simple example, a single-degree-of-freedom system was studied both numerically and experimentally while subjected to a range of frequency near its resonance as the first step toward application for control of tall buildings under vortex shedding. It was found that the peak displacement of the damped system was decreased as much as 43% as compared with that with a conventional tuned mass damper. With the confirmation of both theoretical and experimental results for this basic example, a more practical and realistic example of a wind-excited 76-story benchmark building was studied. In this example, the current bioinspired tuned mass damper, although passive, showed better performance than the conventional passive tuned mass damper and was also comparable with the semiactive tuned mass damper in its capability of reduction in displacements and accelerations at various floors. (C) 2017 American Society of Civil Engineers.