The Earthquake Engineering Online Archive

Application of a mass damping system to bridge structures

Hasegawa, Kinji; Kelly, James M.

UCB/EERC-92/12, Earthquake Engineering Research Center, University of California, Berkeley, 1992-08, 103 pages (630/H37/1992)

This paper studies the tuned mass damping system and the active mass damping system as means of earthquake protection for highway bridges. In order to reduce the energy required to drive the mass, a mass damping system with a variable damper, which needs no energy, is studied. The mass damping system, combined with a variable damper, creates a mass driver which intermittently produces force according to a selected algorithm. The driver, which is the actuator in the active mass damping system, is a damper with a time-varying controllable damping coefficient. In the active mass damping system, any control force can be produced by the actuator. The variable damper, on the other hand, produces the desired force only under specified conditions; otherwise it produces no force.

Available online: http://nisee.berkeley.edu/documents/EERC/EERC-92-12.pdf (6 MB)