Method for preliminary design of a system of viscous dampers applied to a tall building

This paper describes the design process of a vibration mitigation system of viscous dampers adopted on the project of a tall building in Taipei in order to moderate the building's buffeting vibrations. Readily available finite element software are today capable of including damping devices such as viscous dampers in their detailed structural analyses. However, during the design stage when various configurations and variants of the bearing system are generally studied and compared, it is particularly impractical to perform such detailed analyses. Therefore, the ability of performing a quick and preliminary design of viscous dampers' parameters becomes of primary importance. A simple and effective methodology is proposed in this paper and was adopted to establish several scenarios of viscous dampers for the case study. The detailed procedure of the proposed methodology, the different options and the adopted solution are reviewed and discussed.