Wind tunnel investigation of the control of wind-induced tall building vibrations by an active tuned mass damper

A wind tunnel investigation was conducted to investigate how effective an Active Tuned Mass Damper (ATMD) was in suppressing the wind-induced vibrations of tall buildings. The model ATMD and model building were developed at a 1:100 scale and tested in a wind tunnel simulating natural wind flow over a suburban terrain at a 1:100 scale. The ATMD model was developed so that parameters such as mass, stiffness and damping could be altered. Consequently, the ATMD was set-up and tested with five various parameter configurations. The ATMD was driven by a sub-optimal control algorithm which used displacement feedback. The optimal phase shift of the control algorithm was determined to be at 110° which was used for all the wind tunnel tests. The wind tunnel investigations demonstrated that the ATMD was effective in reducing both the along-wind and cross-wind responses of the building.