Seismic performances of a structure equipped with a large mass ratio multiple tuned mass damper

This paper focuses on improvement of structural seismic performance under earthquakes of different intensities using a large mass ratio multiple tuned mass damper (LMTMD). A thermal power plant was taken as the example, and the plant was modeled using the finite element software ABAQUS. Coal buckets, which comprised 29.2% of the total mass of the structure, were used as the mass of the LMTMD. Thus, a large mass ratio was easily achieved without adding any extra mass. Incremental dynamic analysis was used to investigate the seismic fragility of the structures, and the seismic performances of the structure equipped with the LMTMD and the original structure were compared. The damping effectiveness and the control reliability of the LMTMD were evaluated. The fragility curves show that under rare earthquakes, the LMTMD reduced the probability of the moderate damage limit state by 43.9%, and under extremely rare earthquakes, the LMTMD exhibited good control robustness and reduced the probability of the severe damage limit state by 25.1%. Furthermore, the LMTMD could control the deformation pattern of the structure and effectively reduced concentrated damage, especially under high-intensity ground motions; specifically, it reduced the average value of the interstory drift ratio by 1.2%-12% and reduced the standard deviation of the interstory drift ratio by 15%-62%. These results indicate that the LMTMD significantly improved the seismic performance of the structure with satisfactory reliability.