Response of Footbridges equipped with TLD : A numerical and experimental assessment

Sammanfattning: In recent years, an increase to design slender and aesthetically-pleasing structures have resulted in some structures having a low natural frequency. This is because the design calculation did not meet the requirement of serviceability performance. Structures can experience excessive vibrations when they are subjected to different types of dynamic loading. A device can be installed to prevent these vibrations.In this thesis, we study the response of buildings and lateral vibrations of footbridges equipped with Tuned Liquid Damper. The aim is to mitigate the first mode of vibration. Tuned Liquid Damper consists of a container in rectangular, cylindrical or arbitrary shape partially filled with shallow liquid, most often water is used as a regulating device system. The design properties of Tuned Liquid Damper is introduced and it is based on the analogyof the most popular damper, Tuned Mass Damper.An experimental study of a building frame model with four floors is conducted to validate the numerical results obtained from the simulation of the model in ANSYS. The linear and non-linear analysis are performed through a system coupling between Ansys mechanical and Fluent solver. The simulation results obtained are in good agreement with the experimental results.A parametric study is conducted with a simply supported steel footbridge. It is a 45 m long span with 3 m width and the flexural rigidity is modified to get the lateral vibration mode. The first lateral natural frequency obtained is 0.713 Hz. The load case for the study considered is according to Sétra guide. The variable parameters studied is the Tuned Liquid Damper water mass ratios: 0.7%, 1.0%, 2.0%, 3.0% and 4.0%. The results show a satisfactory performance of the footbridge model equipped with Tuned Liquid Damper. The accelerations are below 0.1 m/s2 which satisfied the requirement of 0.15 m/s2.