Dynamic response control of structures using liquid column vibration absorber: an experimental study

The performance and effectiveness of the liquid column vibration absorber (LCVA) in controlling the vibration of structures have been investigated in this paper. To evaluate the performance of LCVA system in mitigating the structural response under dynamic loading (i.e. harmonic excitation), a set of experiments are conducted on a scaled model of steel structure-LCVA system. LCVA have non-uniform cross-sectional dimensions of the horizontal and vertical columns whereas Tuned Liquid Column Damper (TLCD) carries same cross-sectional dimensions. For conducting a comparative study, same experiments were performed for TLCD also. Several excitation frequency ratios (0.5–2.0) and various mass ratios (5–7.5%) are considered in this study. The parameter, tuning ratio considered for all of the experiments is 1.0. The effectiveness of the LCVA and TLCD is measured based on the response reduction of the structure. From the experimental results, it is observed that LCVA has better performance in controlling the structural response.