Experimental comparison of nonlinear damping performance of toroidal and conventional tuned liquid column dampers

Conventional tuned liquid column dampers (TLCDs) are deficient in multidirectionality. In contrast, toroidal TLCDs are designed to extend the application to multidirectional vibration control. This article employs real-time hybrid simulation (RTHS) to experimentally investigate the nonlinear damping effects of toroidal and conventional TLCDs in different directions. The RTHS framework consists of toroidal and conventional TLCD models as the physical substructure and a single-degree-of-freedom (SDOF) structure as the numerical substructure. The excitations cover seismic ground motions and harmonic signals. Different structural parameters and peak ground acceleration (PGA) of the ground motions are assigned to the numerical substructure. It is reported that the conventional TLCD has the most remarkable vibration control effect in its main control direction, while it has efficiency loss in other directions. The efficiencies of toroidal TLCD in arbitrary directions are found to be slightly lower to that of convention TLCD in its main control direction. The toroidal TLCD has advantages on omnidirectional damping effects than the conventional TLCD. Lastly, the satisfactory performance of toroidal TLCD under different structural parameters and PGA values confirms the certain robustness of toroidal TLCD.