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A new device can counteract the frequency at which a building vibrates. (AP Photo/Seth
Wenig)
But there are drawbacks to TMDs. For one thing, they’ve very expensive.
(Retro tting the Theme Building at the Los Angeles International Airport, a
historical landmark, required 600 tons of steel and cost a total of $12.3
million.) And TMDs are also very large, so that buildings that use them
“lose prime real estate,” according to Rob Berry, the NASA project manager
for the team that developed the technology.
A liquid anchor
The nal version of the LOX Damper weighed less than 100 pounds and was
installed in the rocket’s main fuel tank. This altered the fundamental
response of the rocket, resulting in 20 times less vibration. The result was a
rocket safe for humans.
“Everything with mass and stiffness has got a natural frequency, (so) a
building will want to move,” he says. “Say the building wants to move at 2.5
hertz. They’ll set that to be the frequency of the tuned mass damper. That
knocks out some of the response of the building.”
The force that causes the building to vibrate doesn’t gure into this
calculation—all that matters is the frequency of the building’s motion. To
test out the technology, the NASA team developed a new device called a
disruptive tuned mass (DTM) speci cally designed for buildings. After a test
at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, proved
successful, NASA “reached out to the architecture and engineering rms”
to tell them about the new opportunity, according to Berry.
The latest version of the device is approximately the size of coffee can. It
can be placed in a building’s swimming pool, pipes, or even a sprinkler
system. After an engineer determines the frequency at which a building
naturally begins to move in the event of an earthquake or high wind, the
DTM is set to match that frequency. This effectively ties a weight to the
building that prevents it from moving as it otherwise would, just like tying a
brick to a dog’s tail.
Current buildings can be retro tted with the equipment, and the system
can also be included in a new facility’s design. Tower B2 at Paci c Park, in
Brooklyn, New York, is the rst commercial property to have this new DTM
installed. The decision came after the engineering rm Thornton Tomasetti
made a site visit to Marshall to view the building test.
“Thornton Tomasetti saw how simple it was and how effective it was and
they went off and incorporated it into their B2 building,” says Berry.
The goal for B2’s engineers is to reduce the motion of the building in high
winds. But if the building owners decide they want the structure to be even
more stable and withstand earthquake, they can adjust the frequency to
which the DTM is set.
Installing the NASA technology also means that buildings will be able resist
movement from the instant an earthquake strikes. With a traditional TMD,
the building would bear the full force of movement for the four or ve
seconds it takes for the secondary mass to be set in motion. That can be a
destructive few seconds.
There’s still no way to ward off earthquakes. But it’s clear that we can do
more to protect buildings from shifting of tectonic plates beneath the
Earth’s crust. Thanks to NASA, engineers now have one more good option.