Control of flutter of suspension bridge deck using TMD

Passive control of the flutter condition of suspension bridges using a combined vertical and torsional tuned mass damper (TMD) system is presented. The proposed TMD system has two degrees of freedom, which are tuned close to the frequencies corresponding to vertical and torsional symmetric modes of the bridge which get coupled during flutter. The bridge-TMD system is analyzed for finding critical wind speed for flutter using a finite element approach. Thomas Suspension Bridge is analyzed as an illustrative example. The effectiveness of the TMD system in increasing the critical flutter speed of the bridge is investigated through a parametric study. The results of the parametric study led to the optimization of some important parameters such as mass ratio, TMD damping ratio, tuning frequency, and number of TMD systems which provide maximum critical flutter wind speed of the suspension bridge.