Seismic vibration control for 20-story nonlinear benchmark building installed with shape memory alloy damper

Abstract

This paper presents a passive control strategy for 20-story nonlinear benchmark building using Shape Memory Alloy (SMA)-based damper. The problem for seismically excited nonlinear benchmark buildings was published with a goal to provide a clear basis to evaluate the relative merits of various passive, active, or semi-active structural control strategies on seismically excited building. The benchmark problem considers various levels of each of the earthquake records including 0.5, 1.0, and 1.5 times the magnitude of El Centro (1940) and Hachinohe (1968); and 0.5 and 1.0 times the magnitude of Northridge (1994) and Kobe (1995). This makes a total of 10 earthquake records to be considered in the evaluation. The passive control uses a Shape Memory Alloy (SMA)-based device which uses the superelasticity property of SMAs. The SMA wires show hysteresis properties with large recoverable strains which can dissipate energy from the structures. Improved Graesser and Cozzarelli model for SMA wire is used for mathematical modeling of SMAs in MATLAB and Simulink. Six different configurations are used for damper placement. The evaluation results show that SMA-based damper is able to reduce the base shear criteria of the structure effectively. The damper is also able to reduce the occurrence of number of plastic connections in most of the earthquake cases. It also controlled the ductility and dissipated energy criteria effectively. Overall, studying all the evaluation criteria it can be concluded that Shape Memory Alloy damper as a passive device can reduce the responses of the structure moderately and can be used for seismic vibration control.