Energy regenerative tuned mass dampers in high-rise buildings

This study investigates a novel energy regenerative tuned mass damper (TMD) with dual functions—vibration control and energy harvesting—in a high-rise building. The energy regenerative TMD consists of a pendulum-type TMD, an electromagnetic damper, and an energy-harvesting circuit. A simple optimal design method for energy regenerative TMD is proposed, in which a fixed duty-cycle buck-boost converter is employed as the energy-harvesting circuit to optimize the energy-harvesting efficiency and damping coefficient of the TMD. This study is organized into two main tasks: (a) characterizing and modeling the energy regenerative TMD through laboratory testing of a scaled prototype and (b) evaluating the vibration control and energy-harvesting performance of the energy regenerative TMD when applied in a 76-story wind-excited benchmark building in consideration of the nonlinearities in the energy regenerative TMD. The simulations reveal that the harvested electric power averages from hundreds of watts to kilowatts level when the mean wind speed ranges 8–25 m/s. Meanwhile, the building vibration is mitigated with the control performance comparable to the optimally designed passive TMD in a wide range of wind speed. The results in this study clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of the dual-function energy regenerative TMD when applied to building structures.