Simulating a conical tuned liquid damper

In recent years, tuned liquid dampers (TLD) have proved a successful control strategy for reducing structural vibrations. The present study focuses on the frustum-conical TLD as an alternative to the traditional cylindrical tank. If compared to the cylindrical reservoir, the cone-shaped TLD allows calibrating its natural frequency through varying liquid depth, which makes it suitable for a semi-active implementation, and attains the same level of performance with a fewer mass, at least for small fluid oscillations. A linear model is presented which can interpret TLD’s behaviour for small excitations. For larger amplitudes, strong nonlinearities occur and the linear model is no longer predictive. Consequently, for a frustum-cone TLD subjected to harmonic excitations, a tuned mass damper (TMD) analogy is established where TMD parameters vary with the excitation amplitude.