A parametric study of a tower controlled by a pendulum tuned mass damper: beam modelling

Abstract

This paper models a tower with a passive Pendulum Tuned Mass Damper (PTMD) with Finite Elements (FE) using the resources and capabilities of commercial software ANSYS. Although structural control of high and slender towers using PTMDs are widely studied in literature, it was not found yet studies modelling the PTMD with ANSYS. This FE model is called by a routine coded in MATLAB to find the relation between the mass, length, stiffness, and damping coefficient of the pendulum in function of the high vibration amplitudes at the top of the tower (defined as a beam element type). This parametric study of the dynamic behaviour of the PTMD + FE beam structural model is analysed and its results are compared to a genetic optimization developed in other researches to find the best pendulum parameters.