A Study on Application of Tuned Mass Damper to Piping System under Earthquake

A Tuned Mass Damper (TMD) is one of the most widely used devices for the structural vibration control. The concept of vibration control using the TMD began in 1909 when Frahm developed a vibration control device called a dynamic vibration absorber. Examples of these various TMD applications include, but are not limited to civil / architectural / mechanical structural systems such as bridges, high-rise buildings, control towers, and mechanical structures. In this study, the applicability of the TMD to piping system under seismic load was investigated through comparison of seismic responses. This study investigated how much the system response is reduced to some extent when applying TMD to piping systems under earthquake loading. Piping systems described in Bezler et al. (1985) was utilized for the TMD application. As a result, a total of four modes were found in the dominant frequency band of the seismic load, and the first, second, and fourth modes with relatively large mass participation ratios were selected as the TMD installation locations. For the earthquake input, artificial earthquake time history loadings enveloping US NRC RG 1.60 DRS was considered. As a result of numerical analysis, it was confirmed that each directional acceleration response was reduced by 11% ~ 55% in the pipe element on the TMD installation locations.