Shaking table test of the shock absorbing performance of a new cable-damper stopper for coal-fired thermal power plants

Coal-fired thermal power plants play important roles in daily life but are vulnerable to earthquakes. This paper presents a novel cable-damper stopper with linear damping and carries out a series of shaking table tests to evaluate its performance on a 1/25-scaled coal-fired thermal power plant. The stopper consists of a cable, a linear viscous damper and a steel block attached to the boiler. The seismic responses of the structure equipped with different sets of cable-damper stoppers which are of different damping coefficients and diameters of cables were studied and evaluated, where three seismic ground motions with two intensities were selected as input motions. The obtained acceleration and displacement responses of the support structure and the boiler reveal that the stopper cable effectively restrains the relative displacement between the boiler and the support structure. Furthermore, it can be found that the damping affects the seismic protection performance of the stopper depending on the intensity of the boiler vibration. In the paper, the working mechanism of the stopper is also analyzed based on the test data. It turns out that the stopper is more effective when it works under severe earthquakes.