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🏗️ Tuned Mass Damper Vibration Control

Explore how a tuned mass damper — a secondary mass, spring, and damper tuned to a building's natural frequency — cancels resonant sway from wind and earthquakes, the same principle behind the 660-tonne pendulum atop Taipei 101.

Civil Engineering & Structural Mechanics3DModerate60 FPS💨 Air & Wind 🌍 Earth

The simulator demonstrates how coupling a small, precisely tuned secondary mass-spring-damper system to a primary structure reshapes its resonant response, splitting one dangerous resonant peak into two smaller, more manageable peaks, and how mistuning the auxiliary frequency or choosing a poor mass ratio weakens or even worsens that suppression.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

🎮 How to Use

Set the primary structure's mass, stiffness, and damping to define its natural sway frequency, then choose the auxiliary mass size and tune its spring stiffness relative to that target frequency. Sweep the forcing frequency to watch the live frequency response curve reshape, compare peak sway amplitude with the damper enabled versus disabled, and experiment with deliberately mistuning the auxiliary frequency or changing the damping coefficient to see suppression degrade.

💡 Did You Know?

Taipei 101's 660-metric-ton steel pendulum damper is tuned so precisely that during a strong 2015 typhoon it was recorded swinging roughly a meter from center, visibly absorbing wind energy that would otherwise have translated into far larger, uncomfortable sway at the building's occupied floors.

⚙ Under the hood

structural engineeringvibration controlresonancedampingcivil engineeringskyscrapersearthquake engineeringmechanical vibrations

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install