Optimal tuned mass damper for seismic applications and practical design formulas

In seismic retrofit of a long-span truss bridge in Japan, a new retrofit scheme was applied in which the existing bearings of the bridge were replaced by a new floor deck isolation system. The floor decks and isolation system together can be viewed as a giant tuned mass damper (TMD) to reduce the seismic force of the truss. This motivates a study on the optimal design of a TMD for a single-degree-of-freedom structure under seismic loads in this paper. Kanai–Tajimi spectrum is selected to model the earthquake excitation. It is shown that, when ratio of the characteristic ground frequency in the Kanai–Tajimi spectrum to the structural frequency is above three, the ground motion can be assumed to be a white noise to design TMD. For a smaller ground frequency ratio, simple formulas of the optimal TMD parameters are obtained. The dependence of optimal TMD parameters on mass ratio especially for large TMD is highlighted. It is found that the optimal TMD has lower tuning frequency and higher damping ratio as the mass ratio increases. For a large mass ratio, TMD becomes very effective in minimizing the primary structure response and robust against uncertainties in the parameters of the system.