EACS 2016 Paper No. 114
Tuned liquid damper (TLD), as a low cost and maintenance energy-absorbing device, is an effective passive control technique to suppress structural vibration under wind and seismic loads. The dynamic characteristic of TLD is highly dependent on its geometric sizes as well as liquid volumes. Hence, the relationship between control performance and TLD sizes is critical to the optimization of TLD design. Due to its strongly nonlinear behaviour, experiments rather than pure numerical simulations may be more reasonable to evaluate dynamic responses of structure-TLD systems. In this paper, the real-time hybrid simulation (RTHS) is employed to investigate the size effect of TLD on control efficiency, in which TLD devices, with varied geometric sizes, are experimentally modelled as physical substructures, and controlled structures are numerically simulated as numerical substructures. A series of RTHSs are carried out with the premise of same controlled structures as well as mass ratio; and the variation of mass scale is also taken into account. Results show that the TLD performance is sizedependent; a shallow liquid in TLD with lower relative liquid depth may be more efficient on both peak and RMS responses control. Experiments with scaled TLD models will overestimate the control performance of prototype TLD devices, indicating that full-scale TLD experiments should be pursued.