Shake table tests of a quarter‐scale three‐storey building model with piezoelectric friction dampers

A previously designed and fabricated friction damper with four piezoelectric actuators was installed on the first storey of a quarter-scale, three-storey building model mounted on a shake table. The performance of the damper and a simple semi-active control strategy were evaluated both numerically and experimentally under four modified earthquake ground motion records of various amplitudes. The seismic effectiveness and adaptability of the algorithm as well as the effect of damper saturation on structural responses were investigated. Numerical simulations agree well with the experimental results. The proposed control strategy not only effectively suppresses the structural vibration, but also is adaptive to varying excitations from weak and strong earthquakes. Experimental results indicate that a piezoelectric friction damper with slight saturation could be advantageous to the seismic mitigation of buildings. However, significant saturation will degrade the performance of the semi-active control strategy. Further improvement in efficiency of force generation of the proposed device seems feasible to make the device competitive over other representative semi-active control devices. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.