Control of 3-D coupled responses of wind-excited tall buildings by a spatially placed TLCD system

The possible application of a spatially placed passive tuned liquid column damper system for suppressing coupled lateral-torsional responses of tall buildings is investigated in this paper. The wind loads acting on rectangular tall buildings are analytically expressed as 3-D stochastic model. Meanwhile, the 3-D responses of tall buildings may be coupled due to eccentricities between the stiffness and mass centers of the buildings. In these cases, torsional responses of the buildings are rather larger, and a TLCD system composed of several TLCD located near the sides of the buildings is more effective than the same TLCD placed at the building center in reducing both translational and torsional responses of the buildings. In this paper, extensive analytical and numerical work has been done to present the calculation method and optimize the parameters of such TLCD systems. The numerical examples show that the spatially placed TLCD system can reduce coupled along-wind, across-wind and torsional responses significantly with a fairly small mass ratio.