Active Control of Tall Buildings

Abstract

The active control of a tall building, using tendons, is offered as an alternative control mechanism to that using an active tuned mass damper as this has been done in the Citicorp Center of New York City. It is shown that the tendon control system, when applied to a building subjected to self‐excited wind forces, provides more efficient control than a tuned mass damper system. However, tendon control may need larger forces than the tuned mass damper control. The paper shows systematically, with a numerical example, how to design the optimal control forces for both active tendons and active tuned mass dampers in order to introduce active damping to a tall building, even under nonlinear structural behavior, and the paper provides a comparison between two schemes of control.