LAUSR

Abstract The building mass damper (BMD) design features the use of partial structural mass, instead of additional tuned mass, as an energy absorber. Therefore, it becomes more effective in dynamic response reduction compared to the conventional tuned mass damper (TMD) design with very limited added tuned mass. In this study, an optimum building mass damper (OBMD) design approach, namely optimum dynamic response control approach, based on a simplified 3-lumped-mass structure model is proposed to enhance the seismic performances of both the superstructure (or tuned mass) and substructure (or primary structure) respectively above and below the control layer. A series of shaking table tests on one bare and two OBMD specimens were conducted to experimentally verify the efficacy of the proposed OBMD design approach. To further demonstrate the advantage of the OBMD design conditionally over other passive control approaches, the seismic responses of the same structure model but respectively designed with a mid-story seismic isolation (MSI) system and additional energy dissipation devices are also numerically analyzed and compared. It is found that the OBMD design can reveal a better seismic performance than the energy dissipation design. More importantly, it can have a comparable and even superior seismic performance to the MSI design especially when the structure model has a medium or long period of vibration.