An Experimental Study of Semiactive Modal Neuro-control Scheme Using MR Damper for Building Structure

In this study, a semiactive modal neuro-control scheme which combines the modal neuro-control algorithm with a semiactive MR damper is proposed, and its effectiveness is experimentally verified through a series of shaking table tests. A modal neuro-control scheme uses modal coordinates as inputs of neuro-controller. Hence, it is more convenient to design the controller compared with conventional neuro-control schemes. A Kalman filter is introduced to estimate modal states from measurements. Moreover, the clipped algorithm is adopted to provide an appropriate command voltage to an MR damper. For shaking table tests, a scaled three-story shear building model is considered. Two types of semiactive modal neuro-controllers are trained with a reproduced El Centro earthquake for their own purposes. The performance of the proposed semiactive modal neuro-control scheme is compared with that of the passive-optimal case. In the experiments, the proposed semiactive modal neuro-controllers show better performance than the passive-optimal case, especially in adaptability over various excitations and reducing inter-story drifts as well as accelerations. Moreover, the proposed scheme can be designed for specific purpose which fulfills the designer's requirement (e.g., focusing on reducing inter-story drifts). Therefore, the proposed semiactive modal neuro-controller can be effectively used in reducing seismic responses of large engineering structures.