Simulation and experiment validation of simultaneous vibration control and energy harvesting from buildings using Tuned Mass Dampers

For the protection of the structure safety and occupant comfort, the vibrations of the tall buildings are serious concerns for both engineers and architects. In order to mitigate the vibration, different approaches have been proposed, among which Tuned Mass Dampers (TMDs) are one of the most preferable and have been widely used in practice. Instead of dissipating the vibration energy into heat waste via the viscous damping element, this paper presents an approach to harvest the vibration energy from tall buildings with TMDs, by replacing the damping element with electromagnetic harvester. This paper demonstrates that vibration control and energy harvesting can be obtained simultaneously. Based on the proposed switch based energy harvesting circuit with both power regulation and force control functions, two control strategies are investigated in this paper. One is the clipped Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG) control, where the TMD is controlled in a semi-active way with practical force constraints while electricity is harvested. The other one is an implemented energy-harvesting TMD with the duty cycle of the energy harvesting circuit controlled by Pulse Width Modulation (PWM). In this case, the vibration performance is quite close to the traditional TMD while the vibration energy is converted into electricity. An experiment using the second control strategy is conducted based on a three-stories building prototype with electricity generating TMD composed of a rotational motor and rack-pinion mechanism.