• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.403-414
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• 2019

Offshore drilling has become a key process for obtaining oil. Offshore platforms have many applications, including oil exploration and production, navigation, ship loading and unloading, and bridge and causeway support. However, vibration problems caused by severe environmental loads, such as ice, wave, wind, and seismic loads, threaten the functionality of platform facilities and the comfort of workers. These concerns may result in piping failures, unsatisfactory equipment reliability, and safety concerns. Therefore, the vibration control of offshore platforms is essential for assuring structural safety, equipment functionality, and human comfort. In this study, an optimal multiple tuned mass damper (MTMD) system was proposed to mitigate the excessive vibration of a three-dimensional offshore platform under ice and earthquake loadings. The MTMD system was designed to control the first few dominant coupled modes. The optimal placement and system parameters of the MTMD are determined based on controlled modal properties. Numerical simulation results show that the proposed MTMD system can effectively reduce the displacement and acceleration responses of the offshore platform, thus improving safety and serviceability. Moreover, this study proposes an optimal design procedure for the MTMD system to determine the optimal location, moving direction, and system parameters of each unit of the tuned mass damper.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.459-478
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• 2015

The design of a passive control solution based on tuned mass dampers (TMD's) requires the estimation of the actual masses involved in the undesired vibration. This task may result not so straightforward as expected when the vibration resides in subsets of different structural components. This occurs, for instance, when the goal is to damp out vibrations on stays. The theoretical aspects are first discussed and a design process is formulated. For sake of exemplification, a multiple TMD's configurations is eventually conceived for an existing timber footbridge located in the municipality of Trasaghis (North-Eastern Italy). The bridge span is 83 m and the deck width is 3.82 m.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.14 no.6
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• pp.567-576
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• 2018

This manuscript introduces a new damping device which is composed of a water tank and a pendulum. The new damping device can be tuned to multiple frequencies. In addition, it has a higher energy dissipation capacity when compared with the conventional Tuned Liquid Dampers (TLDs). In order to evaluate the efficiency of this new damping device a series of free vibration and forced vibration tests were conducted on a scaled down single-story one-bay steel frame. Two different configurations were studied for the mass of the pendulum that included a completely and a partially submerged mass. It was observed that the completely submerged configuration led to 44% higher damping ratio when compared with the conventional TLD. In addition, the completely submerged configuration reduced the peak displacement response of the structure 1.6 times more than the conventional TLD. The peak acceleration response of the structure equipped with the new damping device was reduced twice more than the conventional TLD. It was also found that, when the excitation frequency is lower than the resonance frequency, the conventional TLD performs better than the partially submerged configuration of the new damping device.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.86 no.5
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• pp.647-661
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• 2023

It is recognized that the installation of energy dissipation devices, such as the tuned mass damper (TMD), decreases the dynamic response of structures, however, the best parameters of each device persist hard to determine. Unlike many works that perform only a deterministic optimization, this work proposes a complete methodology to minimize the dynamic response of footbridges by optimizing the parameters of multiple tuned mass dampers (MTMD) taking into account uncertainties present in the parameters of the structure and also of the human excitation. For application purposes, a steel footbridge, based on a real structure, is studied. Three different scenarios for the MTMD are simulated. The proposed robust optimization problem is solved via the Circle-Inspired Optimization Algorithm (CIOA), a novel and efficient metaheuristic algorithm recently developed by the authors. The objective function is to minimize the mean maximum vertical displacement of the footbridge, whereas the design variables are the stiffness and damping constants of the MTMD. The results showed the excellent capacity of the proposed methodology, reducing the mean maximum vertical displacement by more than 36% and in a computational time about 9% less than using a classical genetic algorithm. The results obtained by the proposed methodology are also compared with results obtained through traditional TMD design methods, showing again the best performance of the proposed optimization method. Finally, an analysis of the maximum vertical acceleration showed a reduction of more than 91% for the three scenarios, leading the footbridge to acceleration values below the recommended comfort limits. Hence, the proposed methodology could be employed to optimize MTMD, improving the design of footbridges.

• Wind and Structures
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.251-264
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• 2004

The effects of a class of nonlinear Tuned Mass Dampers on the aeroelastic behavior of SDOF systems are investigated. Unlike classical linear TMDs, nonlinear constitutive laws of the internal damping acting between the primary oscillator and the TMD are considered, while the elastic properties are keept linear. The perturbative Multiple Scale Method is applied to derive a set of bifurcation equations in the amplitude and phase and a parametric analysis is performed to describe the postcritical scenario of the system. Both cubic- and van der Pol-type dampings are considered and the dependence of the limit-cycle amplitudes on the system parameters is studied. These new results, compared with the previously obtained bifurcation scenario of a SDOF aeroelastic oscillator equipped with a linear TMD, show a detrimental effect on the maximum limit-cycle amplitude reduction of the nonlinear TMD. However, the analyses evidence that in the parameter region away from the perfect tuning condition the nonlinear connection can be used to tune the system with an enhancement of the limit-cycle amplitude reduction.