A Novel Tuned Mass Amplified Inertance Damper for Vibration Control of Building Structures

In vibration control of building structures, the application of classical tuned mass dampers (TMDs) often faces challenges, particularly the need for a large mass to be effective. While alternative devices like the tuned mass damper inerter (TMDI) offer improved performance over the TMD with a reduced physical mass, existing TMDI configurations generally require the inerter to be either grounded or spanned across several stories, hindering their practical implementation. To overcome these limitations, a novel tuned mass amplified inertance damper (TMAID) is proposed, integrating a TMD with an inerter and a lever amplification device. The TMAID is installed on the penultimate floor, with its lever connected to the top floor. This configuration avoids grounding or spanning the inerter, while the lever mechanism enhances performance by amplifying the relative displacement across it. A single-story building equipped with a TMAID is first examined, and closed-form solutions are derived for this case. The model is subsequently extended to multistory buildings. Results from a simple three-story structural model indicate that, when designed optimally with proper leverage amplification, the TMAID performs comparably to the grounded TMDI but without the need to connect the inerter to the ground. Results from a ten-story structure show that the TMAID delivers seismic performance comparable to a classical TMD (1% mass ratio) but with only a fraction of the physical mass (0.1% mass ratio). By removing the constraints associated with the TMDI, the proposed TMAID offers a high-performance, lightweight, and readily implementable alternative for mitigating vibrations in building structures.