New Type of Pounding Tuned Mass Damper for Confined Space

Due to their construction features, many structures have confined spaces, such as the hollow tube of a wind turbine tower and the tube members of large-span space structures. To meet the requirement of aesthetics, the confined hollow space can be used to house a damper. This paper proposes new types of pounding-tuned mass damper for vibration control of a confined space (PTMD-CS). Both a double-sided PTMD-CS (DS-PTMD-CS) and a single-sided PTMD (SS-PTMD-CS) were proposed for use in a confined space. To examine the control performance and robustness of the proposed PTMDs-CS, a hollow steel tube was chosen as the control object. The proposed PTMD-CS was installed inside the confined space of the hollow steel tube. The simulation and experiments were performed to evaluate the effectiveness of the damper. To study the damper's robustness, the natural frequency of the PTMD is tuned away from the structural resonance frequency and forced vibration tests were conducted. The simulation results indicate that the damper can reduce the vibration amplitude significantly even in the detuned cases and has a strong robustness. In addition, the experimental results agree well with the numerical results, which indicate that the pounding force model in this paper is accurate.