High-performance control of wind-induced vibration of high-rise building via innovative high-hardness rubber damper

High-hardness viscoelastic rubber dampers are used to upgrade both the habitability environment and the structural safety in high-rise buildings subjected to wind disturbances. While most of usual viscoelastic dampers have limitation on temperature and frequency dependencies, etc., the proposed high-hardness viscoelastic rubber dampers possess many unprecedented properties. High hardness, large stiffness, small temperature and frequency dependencies are examples of such properties. Mechanical modelling of the proposed high-hardness viscoelastic rubber dampers is introduced first, and the wind-induced response of high-rise buildings with and without the proposed high-hardness viscoelastic rubber dampers is computed under dynamic horizontal loads derived from wind tunnel tests. It is shown that high-rise buildings with the proposed high-hardness viscoelastic rubber dampers exhibit extremely smaller wind-induced responses (both along-wind and cross-wind responses) than those without such dampers. In particular, a remarkable reduction of acceleration has been achieved owing to sufficient hysteresis even in the small strain range. It is concluded that the proposed high-hardness viscoelastic rubber dampers can upgrade the habitability environment of building structures dramatically. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.