Response improvement by using active control of an earthquake excited building

Abstract

Two control laws are proposed to a 5-story government building that had been subjected to the 17 November 1999, Düzce, Turkey Earthquake. The building was moderately damaged although it had adequate size beams and columns, and relatively high concrete strength, unlike the remaining moderately damaged buildings in the area. The aim of this study is to investigate, if the building response could have been improved by using active control. Since the building was rigid, it was known that large control forces were needed. The implementation of a controller to a real structure with large control forces and amount would be unrealistic but to investigate the behavior, a 3-dimensional model of the five story building has been formed and 20 actuators, 4 at each level, are symmetrically placed and a control law is formed to improve the building response. Precautions to compensate for errors in the model and precautions about the time loss of the control system have been taken. Finally, closed loop simulations of the system shows that the building response can be improved by using active control, and possibly reducing and/or eliminating failure.