Near-Fault Earthquake-Induced Vibration Control of a Supertall Benchmark Building Using an Inerter-Assisted Compliant Liquid Damper

Abstract

To exploit the potential of liquid dampers for vibration control of supertall buildings, it is essential to install sizable liquid tanks at the top of the building to provide a substantial value of damper mass ratio to achieve significant response reductions. To avoid the practical and structural design difficulties involved in this, this study explored the advantage of utilizing a liquid damper in conjunction with an inerter to capitalize on its mass amplification property. To ensure that the liquid damper and the inerter function in tandem, the damper tank must have a compliant connection with the building. In this study, extensive time-domain studies were carried out by modeling a 76-story supertall benchmark building as a multiple-degree-of-freedom lumped mass system and subjecting it to 56 unscaled near-fault earthquake ground motions. The characteristic parameters of the inerter-assisted compliant liquid damper (IA-CLD) are optimized using a genetic algorithm–based multiobjective optimization technique. The means of the maximum interstory drift ratio, along with the peak displacement and acceleration response of the roof, are taken as objective functions. The results indicate that the IA-CLD significantly reduces the probability of exceedance of the set performance limit of the building. The overall performance of the IA-CLD improves as the span of the inerter increases. The optimum inertance ratio converges with its upper limit defined during the optimization. The IA-CLD is quite reliable under a structural stiffness uncertainty of ±20%.