A novel tuned liquid wall damper for multi-hazard mitigation

A structural system consists of gravity and lateral load resisting components. Structural walls in the gravity system are typically designed to resist vertical loads only, and are assumed to be inactive to mitigate lateral loads. In this paper, we propose a novel multifunctional wall system, which is embedded with multiple-capillaries containing free-flowing fluids and can act as both a load carrying member and a Tuned Liquid Wall Damper (TLWD). Functioning similarly to a Tuned Liquid Column Damper (TLCD), the damping force of the proposed wall system is provided by the head loss of the fluid between each capillary. An analytical model is derived first to describe the dynamic behavior of the TLWD. The accuracy of the analytical model is verified using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations. The model is further used to compute the reduced response of an assumed primary structure attached with a TLWD to demonstrate the damping capability. Results show that TLWDs can effectively dissipate energy while occupying much less space in buildings compared to TLCDs.