Seismic Vibration Control of Atrium Buildings Using a Truss-Nonlinear Inertial Mass Damper System

Atrium building is a common structural type that can be found in most of the big cities. For seismic vibration control of buildings with large atria, this paper proposes a novel approach of using a core structure inside the atrium building in combination with a truss-inertial mass damper (IMD) system to form a passive control mechanism. The proposed system utilizes the unsynchronized vibrations between the tops of the building and the core structure to activate the IMD for seismic energy dissipation. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed truss-IMD system, a numerical time-history method is first developed to compute structural response of the atrium building under an earthquake input, followed by parametric studies of the system. Effects of truss stiffness, inertance, and nonlinearity of the IMD on seismic performance of the atrium building are investigated. Results from a simple structural model and a six-story building indicate that the truss-IMD system can significantly alleviate the dynamic responses of the building, and the overall seismic performance improvement brought by the truss-IMD surpasses a truss-viscous damper system. Results also show that for a given set of truss stiffness and damper nonlinearity, there exists an optimal combination of inertance and damping coefficient for the IMD to achieve a maximum structural performance.