Vibration Control of Tall Buildings under Seismic and Wind Loads

Abstract

A procedure for the design of a second-order dynamic controller is presented. The proposed method is applied to the control of structures under earthquake and wind excitations. The controller gains are determined by minimizing the root-mean-square value of the response parameter of interest for the structure, assuming that the excitation is Gaussian white noise. Three examples of structures (of which two are assumed to be subjected to the N-S component of the 1940 El Centro earthquake and one is assumed to be excited by wind loads) are considered to illustrate the design technique. In the first of the earthquake engineering applications, the controller is used for active base isolation of a building modeled as a shear frame, while in the second, it is used to develop an active mass damper for a three-dimensional building with eccentric axes of inertia and rotation (and consequently coupled longitudinal, lateral, and torsional motions). The wind engineering application is the design of an active mass damper for a high-rise building modeled as a planar frame subjected to wind loads. Numerical results for the examples reveal that the actively controlled base-isolation system with velocity feedback has better performance than that with either acceleration or displacement feedback. Complete feedback (i.e., feedback using position, velocity, and acceleration) was used for the active mass damper designs, and the controller was seen to be quite effective in reducing displacement and acceleration levels for both the three-dimensional building (with various eccentric locations of the axes of rotation and inertia) and for the planar frame. For all examples studied the active control systems were observed to perform better than their passive counterparts. Comments on the performance and control effectiveness of these designs and closed-loop-system behavior are made.