Wind - Induced Vibration Control of Long - Span Bridges by Multiple Tuned Mass Dampers





1. Introduction

The developments of vibration control theories have led to the wide use of tuned mass dampers on many engineering structures such as tall buildings, long-span bridges, and so on. Installing a TMD on a long-span bridge has been proven to be effective for suppressing wind-induced vibrations both analytically and experimentally [2-4]. In recent years, the design concept of a TMD is extended to multiple tuned mass dampers (MTMD) which are composed of several small oscillators attached to the main structure [1,5,8]. The main idea of this design is to distribute the natural frequencies of MTMD around the natural frequency of the suppressed mode of the structure for lessening the resonant effects. From the previous studies [1,5,8], we found that MTMD is less sensitive to the offset of the tuning frequency than a single TMD, and the mass of each TMD can be made smaller. The latter is specially important for large structures, because the massive size of the damper may cause difficulties with bridge construction and maintenance.


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