Experimental Investigation of MR Damper-based Semiactive Control Algorithms for Full-scale Five-story Steel Frame Building

In this study, the effectiveness of various semiactive control algorithms based on magnetorheological (MR) dampers is experimentally investigated for seismic protection of a full-scale five-story steel frame building structure. This may be the first experimental comparison of several semiactive control algorithms using a full-scale test structure. The MR damper-based control systems are realized, when an MR damper is designed by deriving a suboptimal design procedure considering optimization problem and magnetic analysis, and then a damper with the capacity of 1.0 ton is manufactured. In the experiments, a linear active mass driver and the linear shaker seismic simulation testing method are used to excite the building structure in order to match the full-scale building vibrate as if the building undergoes an earthquake. Under the four historical earthquakes and one filtered artificial earthquake, the performance of the semiactive control algorithms including the passive optimal case is experimentally evaluated. From the experimental results, one can conclude that the Lyapunov and semiactive neuro-control algorithms are appropriate in reducing accelerations of the structural system, and the passive optimal case and the maximum energy dissipation algorithm show the excellent performance in reducing the first floor displacement.