Optimal design of tuned mass dampers subjected to continuous stationary critical excitation

Abstract

Tuned mass dampers (TMD) have been widely used as one of vibration controlled devices in order to reduce the response of buildings subjected to lateral loads such as earthquake loads. Although the optimal design of TMD subjected to earthquake has received much attention of researchers, finding the most severe earthquake for this purpose has been well-known a challenging task. Hence, this paper proposes the optimal design of TMD subjected to continuous stationary critical excitation as the most severe earthquake. The continuous stationary critical excitation is determined by maximizing structural responses. In this study, the optimal parameters of TMD are determined through minimizing the sum root of the mean square of story drifts defined in the frequency domain. For achieving this purpose, at first, the performance of the improved gravitational search algorithm (IGSA) is verified using a ten story shear building with a TMD as a benchmark example. The numerical results demonstrate that IGSA converges to better solutions in comparison with other algorithms. Finally, the optimal design of TMD parameters obtained for the ten story shear building subjected to the continuous stationary critical excitation.