Passive Damper Control For 76-Story Wind-Excited Benchmark Building

by

A.K. Agrawal1 and J.N. Yang2

1Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering University of California, Irvine, CA 92697, Tel. (714) 824-6166, Fax. (714) 824-3673, email: akagrawa@uci.edu
2Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering University of California, Irvine, CA 92697 Tel. (714) 824-4246, Fax. (714) 824-3673, email: jnyang@uci.edu

Keywords: Wind-Excited Benchmark Problem, Passive Damper Control, Optimal Damper Location, Heuristic Integer Programming

Abstract

Performance of passive energy dissipation dampers, e.g., viscous dampers, visco-elastic dampers, etc., in reducing the response quantities of wind-excited tall buildings has been demonstrated through the retrofit of existing tall buildings. One important problem in using these energy dissipation dampers is the determination of the optimal locations to achieve a maximum performance based on given constraints, such as the number of dampers and their capacity. In this paper, we investigate the optimal placement of passive dampers in the 76-story wind-excited benchmark building, such that various performance criteria defined in the benchmark problem are optimized. Likewise, the required number of passive dampers and their capacity are determined such that a particular performance specified by the design code, such as maximum rms floor acceleration, can be achieved.

The determination of optimal locations for passive dampers is an integer programming problem, which requires extensive search and heavy computational efforts. In this paper, heuristic integer programming techniques are used and they have been found to be quite effective in determining locations of dampers, which are quite close to the optimal ones. Various aspects of the problem, e.g., computational time, search techniques, optimality of locations, etc., will be discussed for the 76-story wind-excited benchmark problem.