The 14th World Conference on Earthquake Engineering

Semi-active control devices have been shown to be more energy efficient than active devices and more effective in reducing seismic structural vibration than passive devices. A new type of semi-active control device, the piezoelectric friction damper has been made in this paper. Piezoelectric actuators used in the dampers can quickly and accurately respond to a voltage signal. They are also effective over a wide frequency band with low power consumption, and are very reliable and compact in design. The damping capabilities of this device can be quickly varied by changing the voltage. Fuzzy control uses expert knowledge instead of differential equations, it does not require accurate information on structural and vibration characteristics of the system and is therefore an attractive alternative for complex and nonlinear systems. A self-tuning fuzzy control algorithm is proposed in this paper to control the response of a seismically excited 20-story nonlinear benchmark building with piezoelectric friction dampers. Interactive relationships between structural responses and input voltage of piezoelectric friction dampers are established by using a fuzzy controller. The results of the simulation indicate that the proposed fuzzy controller can effectively reduce the responses of the building under different earthquake excitations.