Appropriate measures must be taken to comply with vibration limits, particularly in the case of slender high-rise buildings. Activating the façade avoids the common material-intensive approaches, which range from increasing structural stiffness to installing massive tuned-mass dampers to ensure serviceability and user comfort.
Instead, the project uses wind energy in a resource-saving manner by activating an existing mass in the form of a movable double-skin façade for damping (Fig. 1) and harvesting the kinetic energy.
The principle and structure of the adaptive, mass-distributed and self-sufficient damper developed at BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg and TU Berlin is shown in Fig. 2: The outer skin of a double-skin façade is free to move parallel to the inner skin, which is fixed to the building. The generator shown in Fig. 3 dampens the building accelerations and converts the movement into electrical energy (Fig. 4).
To validate the concept and to demonstrate the self-sufficient operation of the controlled damping system, a movable double façade element was realised as a full-scale prototype (Fig. 1). It is installed on a test rig, on which realistic building vibrations can be simulated and the interaction of the façade element with the building can be monitored. At glasstec 2024, the exhibit will demonstrate the operating principle on a small abstract model.
The integration of active technologies such as sensors, actuators and control technology enables multifunctional structures with a high level of user comfort, lower consumption of materials and even the potential of harvesting energy from dynamic impacts.