Moveable Facade Elements for Sustainable High-rise Buildings

This paper presents a sustainable semi-active distributed-Multiple Tuned Facade Damping (d-MTFD) system that utilizes the existing mass of the Double-Skin Facade's outer skin as damping mass to mitigate structural vibrations caused by wind excitation. Based on this concept, a prototype with one full-scale parallel moveable facade element has been developed, built, and validated. A stepper motor working together with its connected energy harvesting circuit is innovatively applied as an adjustable electrical damper and simultaneously as an energy harvester. Its feasibility has been proven through experiments using Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL) simulations. An energy harvesting efficiency of 75% was achieved by using a two-stage power converter as the energy harvesting circuit. The self-sufficiency of the semi-active d-MTFD system was achieved.