Optimum seismic design of a power plant building with pendulum tuned mass damper system by its heavy suspended buckets

This paper focuses on the seismic performance of a typical coal-fired power plant with suspended non-structural coal buckets inside the structure. In order to systematically evaluate and minimize the seismic responses of the power plant, this research developed a mechanism to optimally design the equivalent pendulum-type tuned mass damper (PTMD) system such that the inter-story drifts under earthquake excitations are minimized while the coal buckets are also protected. A full scale computational model of the tested specimen is developed and its modeling details are validated against the experimental results. Subsequently, the optimal ranges for PTMD variables have been derived according to the cases showing most structural response reductions. As a result, a conceptual “length-adaptive” PTMD design according to the optimized results is proposed for the mass-varying system. It is shown that the optimal implementation of PTMD can significantly reduce the inter-story drifts and it also outperforms the adopted PTMD design in the real structure. The study demonstrates a systematic way of achieving the optimal real-structure PTMD design with considerations of uncertainties in earthquake input, system nonlinearities, and other structural complexities.