High‐performance control of wind‐induced vibration of high‐rise building via innovative high‐hardness rubber damper

Abstract

Abstract High‐hardness viscoelastic rubber dampers are used to upgrade both the habitability environment and the structural safety in high‐rise buildings subjected to wind disturbances. While most of usual viscoelastic dampers have limitation on temperature and frequency dependencies, etc., the proposed high‐hardness viscoelastic rubber dampers possess many unprecedented properties. High hardness, large stiffness, small temperature and frequency dependencies are examples of such properties. Mechanical modelling of the proposed high‐hardness viscoelastic rubber dampers is introduced first, and the wind‐induced response of high‐rise buildings with and without the proposed high‐hardness viscoelastic rubber dampers is computed under dynamic horizontal loads derived from wind tunnel tests. It is shown that high‐rise buildings with the proposed high‐hardness viscoelastic rubber dampers exhibit extremely smaller wind‐induced responses (both along‐wind and cross‐wind responses) than those without such dampers. In particular, a remarkable reduction of acceleration has been achieved owing to sufficient hysteresis even in the small strain range. It is concluded that the proposed high‐hardness viscoelastic rubber dampers can upgrade the habitability environment of building structures dramatically. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.