AbstractThe purpose of this paper is to present an innovative insight into the behavior and energy dissipation mechanism of a single‐degree‐of‐freedom (SDOF) structure controlled by pounding tuned mass damper (PTMD). In this study, a shake table test was conducted to investigate energy response of the SDOF structure incorporated with PTMD and subjected to seismic excitations. Moreover, SDOF structure and the updated analytical structural pounding force model based on viscoelasticity of materials have been investigated for parametric studies, including dynamic parameters of the primary structure, properties of PTMD, and characteristics of the earthquake records. The influence of these parameters has been discussed in details in this paper. The results showed that energy can be dissipated by PTMD as well as via the three traditional ways of TMD. The energy dissipated by PTMD keeps increasing during excitation, which is similar to the process of energy dissipated by damping mechanism. Furthermore, energy dissipated by damping and PTMD are nearly equal, and the two types of energy dissipation predominate the behavior of the system. Hysteretic, recoverable elastic strain and kinetic energy of the controlled structure diminish to very low level during earthquakes.