Vibration control of seismically excited structures using an inerter system device

抄録

Mitigating unwanted vibration in civil engineering structures is an important part of the design process, particularly for structures that may be subject to seismic excitation. This paper introduces a passive control device based on the conventional tuned inerter damper (TID) designed for the passive control of seismically excited multi-degree of freedom (MDOF) building structures. The proposed system is based on the conventional TID, with the main difference that its location is changed from the ground level to the last two story-levels of the structural system. Besides, this study employs a metaheuristic optimization based on the differential evolution method (DEM) combined with an elastic displacement history analysis in the time domain, through which the vibration control focuses on two individual objectives: first, minimizing the horizontal peak displacement; and second, minimizing the root mean square (RMS) response of displacement. A case-study of a 12-story building equipped with the novel TID scheme is subjected to seismic base excitations represented by four accelerograms of recorder earthquakes in order to verify the TID effectiveness. The results show a significant enhancement in the dynamic response when the TID arrangement proposed herein is applied, better than an equivalent TMD. Therefore, this proposal represents a potentially attractive alternative to traditional passive control techniques.