Semi-active control of wind excited building structures using MR/ER dampers

Abstract A semi-active control strategy for building structures subject to wind loading and controlled by MR/ER dampers is proposed. The power spectral density (PSD) matrix of the fluctuating part of wind velocity vector is diagonalized in the eigenvector space. Each element of the diagonalized PSD matrix is modeled as a set of second-order linear filter driven by white noise. A Bingham model for MR/ER dampers is used. The forces produced by MR/ER dampers are split into passive and active parts and the passive part is combined with structural damping forces. A set of partially averaged Ito equations for controlled modal energies are derived by applying the stochastic averaging method for quasi-integrable-Hamiltonian systems. The optimal control law is then determined by using the stochastic dynamical programming principle and the cost function is so selected that the optimal control law can be implemented by the MR/ER dampers. The response of semi-active controlled structures is predicted by using the reduced Fokker–Planck–Kolmogorov equation associated with fully averaged Ito equations of the controlled structures. A comparison with clipped linear quadratic Gaussian (LQG) control strategy, for an example, shows that the proposed semi-active control strategy for MR/ER dampers is superior to clipped LQG control strategy.