Studies on vibration control effects of a semi-active impact damper for seismically excited nonlinear building

Abstract

The semi-active impact damper (SAID) is proposed to improve the damping efficiency of traditional passive impact dampers. In order to investigate its damping mechanism and vibration control effects on realistic engineering structures, a 20-story nonlinear benchmark building is used as the main structure. The studies on system parameters, including the mass ratio, damping ratio, rigid coefficient, and the intensity of excitation are carried out, and their effects both on linear and nonlinear indexes are evaluated. The damping mechanism is herein further investigated and some suggestions for the design in high-rise buildings are also proposed. To validate the superiority of SAID, an optimal passive particle impact damper (PIDopt) is also investigated as a control group, in which the parameters of the SAID remain the same, and the optimal parameters of the PIDopt are designed by differential evolution algorithm based on a reduced-order model. The numerical simulation shows that the SAID has better control effects than that of the optimized passive particle impact damper, not only for linear indexes (e.g., root mean square response), but also for nonlinear indexes (e.g., component energy consumption and hinge joint curvature).