Passive control of building structures using double-skin façades as vibration absorbers

The potential of double-skin façade systems as distributed mass dampers to reduce vibrations in tall buildings under seismic excitations is investigated in this paper. The design problem consists of determining flexural stiffness of the outer skin, as well as the stiffness of its links to the primary structure and its damping. These structural parameters are estimated through two alternative optimisation procedures, aiming at minimising the standard deviation of the displacements of the first storey of the primary structure. Numerical results are presented for a set of recorded accelerograms to take into account the effects of non-stationary excitations. A direct approach for the design of the stiffness link is also presented, based on observations deriving from the outcome of the optimisation problem.