Experimental and numerical study on vibration control effects of a compound mass damper

Summary A compound mass damper (CMD) was put forwarded based on the joint vibration control effects of tuned liquid damper and colliding particles. A series of shaking table tests were designed in order to investigate the dynamic response of a single degree of freedom bent frame structure with or without the damper (CMD, tuned mass damper, and tuned liquid damper) under three different kinds of earthquake waves. It is shown that the vibration reduction performance of CMD is generally better than the traditional dampers no matter from peak response attenuation rate or root mean square response attenuation rate. The vibration reduction effect of traditional dampers is susceptible to the characteristics of earthquake waves, whereas CMD is effective in a broader frequency bands. Also, the vibration reduction effect of CMD is not sensitive to the amplitude of earthquake waves, which means the system has good robustness. In addition, CMD has the advantage of fast start‐up. The numerical simulation results of the CMD are obtained through certain simplifications, and are in good agreement with the experimental results, which further verifies the damping effect of the proposed damper and provides a simplified method for its engineering design.