Active damping for wind-tunnel aeroelastic models of large civil structures

Structural damping is a keypoint in aero-elastic models since it strongly affects the wind-structure coupling effects. At design stage, e.g. wind tunnel tests, the possibility to tune the damping value able to avoid high vibration levels or instability phenomena allows to define proper damping devices (for example tuned mass dampers) for full-scale structures. Commonly this procedure is performed with passive solutions which are difficult to be tuned and can modify the system parameters. This paper proposes an active-control-based solution able to tune system damping with accuracy and repeatability. A comparison between the standard and this innovative approach is carried out on an aero-elastic model. © 2013 SPIE.