Abstract Summary
Tuned mass dampers are found to be successful in enhancing the structural performance of buildings subjected to wind or seismic loads, but their sensitivity against the uncertainties might strongly reduce their effectiveness. This paper thus provides some insights about the sensitivity of a novel hysteretic tuned mass damper (TMD) in mitigating the seismic response of a prototype building under uncertainties. A two degrees-of-freedom reduced-order model representing a building structure equipped with the TMD is first considered in such a way to facilitate the optimum design of the device’s parameters. Next, a three-dimensional 5-storey laboratory prototype of a steel building equipped with the considered hysteretic TMD is modeled into OpenSees. To this end, a modified Bouc-Wen hysteresis model has been implemented in order to mimic the expected behavior of this novel device. Such numerical model is then employed to investigate the seismic effectiveness of the hysteretic TMD when the parameters of the protected building are uncertain. Several sensitivity analysis techniques are adopted to rank the uncertain parameters of the structure that can affect the performance of the hysteretic TMD. The critical examination of the final results demonstrates that structural damping and floor mass eccentricity along the direction orthogonal to the horizontal seismic ground motion component are the parameters that mostly influence the seismic effectiveness of the considered hysteretic TMD.
