Development of response-controlled tall buildings through own-mass mobilisation

This paper describes a structural response reduction approach that, rather than adding mass as in conventional mass damping techniques, takes advantage of the large inherent mass present within a building and uses its own mass to generate large levels of reliable damping with minimal differential movements and without the need for frequency tuning. The proposed concept challenges the traditional premise of conceiving tall buildings as rigid, static entities, and exploits movements to improve performance. The underlying premise is investigated using purpose-devised aeroelastic wind tunnel tests on a dynamically scaled model of a 300-metre prototype building in which the damping system is explicitly incorporated. The results show reductions exceeding 70% in peak accelerations and 50% in base moments, relative to a conventional undamped configuration, while maintaining differential displacements between the movable floors and the core below 50 mm under the 50-year return wind. The results of the wind tunnel tests, coupled with complementary numerical studies as well seismic time-history simulations, demonstrate the considerable promise of the proposed system for significantly reducing the demands on the superstructure and foundation. This opens the door for low-carbon, high-performance tall building designs that can enable more resilient and sustainable urban development.