A novel bi-directional rail variable friction pendulum-tuned mass damper (BRVFP-TMD).

• Bi-directional rail variable friction pendulum-tuned mass damper (BRVFP-TMD) was proposed. • Bi-directional traditional friction pendulum systems were improved by geometric nonlinearity. • The impact of bi-direction motion to the bi-directional friction pendulum systems was revealed. • Closed-form solutions for the optimal parameters of BRVFP-TMD were obtained. • Bi-directional loadings were conducted to illustrate the superiority of BRVFP-TMD. The shape of hysteretic loops for a friction pendulum system transforms when excited by bi-directional motion, which exhibits unexpected dynamic behavior compared with unidirectional motion. Therefore, a novel bidirectional rail variable friction pendulum-tuned mass damper (BRVFP-TMD) with two independent rails that satisfied the purpose of bidirectional structural response control and provided a full bidirectional friction force was proposed. The variable friction arrangement was applied to the rails so that the BRVFP-TMD could be accomplished with a linear hysteretic damping property that is contributed by the displacement-dependent variable friction force. Using unidirectional harmonic excitations with attack angle as bi-directional loading, illustrations were created to investigate the control effect of traditional pendulum friction TMDs with a spherical sliding surface. This demonstrated the collapse of hysteretic loops of traditional pendulum friction TMDs and superiority of BRVFP-TMD in terms of mechanism. For the BRVFP-TMD with a lightly damped structure, the optimizations of the fixed-point theory were accessed to obtain the closed-form solutions of the optimal parameters of the BRVFP-TMD. Numerical verifications based on bidirectional motions were conducted to evaluate the performance of the BRVFP-TMD. The bidirectional earthquake results indicated stable and excellent performance of the BRVFP-TMD in terms of either frequency response reduction or friction energy dissipation efficiency. Meanwhile, bidirectional wind-induced vibrations confirmed the correctness of the optimization and the stable robustness of the optimized BRVFP-TMD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]