Investigation of Control Performance of a Smart Top- Story Isolation System

The control performance of a smart top-story isolation system for a building structure subjected to seismic excitation was investigated in this paper. For this purpose, a 20-story shear building model was selected as an example structure and an artificial earthquake generated based on design spectrum of low-to-moderate seismicity regions such as Korea was used for structural analyses. MR damper and low damping elastomeric bearings were used to compose a smart base isolation system. A fuzzy logic controller (FLC) was used to control an MR damper and the FLC was optimized by genetic algorithms (GA). Based on numerical simulation results, it has been shown that a smart top-story isolation system can effectively reduce both structural responses and isolation story drifts of the building structure in comparison with a passive top-story isolation system.