The active control scheme has been studied to suppress the vibrations of large civil engineering structures. Recently, constructions of large and slender structures have been increased owing to the advancement of the structural engineering technologies and the development of the new light weight and high strength construction materials. Consequently vibration problems of those slender structures have become a new issue in the area of structural engineering. At the early years, passive control systems, such as tuned mass damper(TMD) and turned liquid mass damper(TLD), have been utilized to reduce the wind induced vibrations of tall buildings and long-span bridges. More recently, the active control concept has been applied to reduce the structural vibration and increase the human comfortness in tall buildings during strong wind.
In this study, the effectiveness of the active tuned mass damper(ATMD) has been investigated for reducing vibration of large structures during strong earthquake. Stochastic optimal control technique has been employed. Adaptive control scheme has been also used to consider the uncertainty of the structural dynamic parameters. Example analyses are carried out through analytical simulation studies. Numerical results indicate that the active control system is more effective to reduce the structural vibration due to the wide-banded excitation such as the earthquake loading than the passive control.
