Home / Games / Tune the Damper
🌍 Tune the Damper
A building shakes under an earthquake. Add damping and its response shrinks — but real dampers cost real money. Find the minimum damping that keeps the building under the safety limit, without overspending on damping you don't need. Real Newmark-β time-history physics, no faking it.
Scenario
Fixed building: Tn = 0.8 s natural period, subjected to a synthetic multi-frequency earthquake record scaled to 0.35g peak ground acceleration.
Safety limit: 100 mm peak displacement.
Your Damping
Live Response
—
Peak Displacement
—
Damper Cost Score
—
Best Safe Cost This Session
🎯 Goal: find the lowest ζ that still keeps peak displacement ≤ 100 mm — every extra % of damping beyond that is wasted cost.
This game runs the exact same Newmark-β time-integration
solver (
engine/dynamics.js → sdofNewmark) used in the Seismic
Response and Response Spectrum simulations — the same engine that had a real
coefficient bug found and fixed during this project's verification work (see
tests/dynamics.test.js). The damper cost score is a simplified
proportional stand-in (cost ∝ ζ) for illustration, not a real cost-engineering model.Method
ModelSDOF system under base excitation, Newmark average-acceleration integration (β=¼, γ=½), unconditionally stable (Chopra §5.3).
Ground motionA synthetic sum of four sine waves at different frequencies with exponential decay — illustrative, not a real recorded earthquake.