Optimal damping of multi-story buildings under wind excitation

Abstract

Wind excited vibrations of high-rise buildings can be reduced by installing additional damping devices like tuned mass dampers. The design of tuned mass dampers on different levels of the building is performed via a computer-aided modeling and design approach. A multi body system model is used for describing the dynamic behavior of the structure and the problem of optimizing the parameters of the damping devices is formulated as a nonlinear programming problem. An application to a building of the University of Stuttgart shows that optimal designs with minimal accelerations of the building can easily be obtained.