Seismic performance of pendulum and translational roof-garden TMDs

In a previous paper, the authors already introduced the concept of the roof-garden TMD, an innovative passive vibration absorber for building structures, meant to combine the dynamic response mitigation capabilities of traditional tuned mass dampers (TMDs) with the environmental advantages of traditional roof gardens. In order to limit the mistuning effect and control loss due to the intrinsic variability of its mass, a roof-garden TMD of the rolling-pendulum type, advantageously characterized by a mass-independent natural period although unfortunately inherently non-linear, was then proposed and its performance assessed for increasing values of mass uncertainty and excitation levels. In the present study, the rolling-pendulum type is compared with the well-known translational configuration, the latter expectedly more prone to mistuning and yet insensitive to seismic intensity because of its linear behaviour. The trade-off between the two schemes is first explored for the case of a single-degree-of-freedom (SDOF) structure under a variety of design scenarios and then demonstrated through simulations on a building structure recently completed in a seismic site in Central Italy and designed to host a roof-garden atop for architectural purposes