Tall building design incorporating passive dampers as material savers

Passive mass damper systems can be effectively utilised in the design of tall buildings and towers to suppress wind-induced oscillations. The inclusion of such damper systems will reduce the need for lateral stiffness and will result in simpler structural systems which save both construction time and material. The added cost of including a damper system is usually a small percentage of the total structure cost and is well compensated by the aforesaid savings. The underlying principle is to replace lateral stiffness by damping in order to satisfy serviceability limit states such as lateral drift and accelerations induced by severe wind loads.