VIBRATION CONTROL USING THE STRUCTURAL COUPLING TECHNIQUE BETWEEN ADJACENT BUILDINGS WITH DIFFERENT CONTROL DEVICES

Resumo

The use of structural control in vibration mitigation is becoming increasingly common in
buildings. Forces of nature such as wind and earthquakes show how buildings are vulnerable to their
actions. A control technique that is gaining space is the structural coupling. This technique consists of
connecting two adjacent structures using different control devices, so that control forces are exerted
from one structure on the other to reduce the dynamic response of each structure individually and the
coupled system. To study the efficiency of this technique, a system containing two adjacent structures
was used. The system was modeled as having two degrees of freedom and subjected to seismic action
of three earthquakes with different frequencies. In the first step of the analysis, a passive control device
was used. The device parameters were optimized through a particle swarm optimization algorithm. In
the second step, an actuator was used, an active control device, in which it was optimized by the Linear
Quadratic Regulator. Finally, in the last step, the two devices, passive and active, were used together,
composing an hybrid control. The results indicated the importance of the structure response in the
performance of each control device. The coupling technique proved effective in mitigating vibration
amplitude, with reductions of up to 80% in displacements and 85% in velocities and accelerations.