FRAGILITY CURVES FOR STRUCTURES EQUIPPED WITH OPTIMAL SATMDs

In this paper, a procedure has been presented to develop fragility curves of structures equipped with optimal variable damping or stiffness semi-active tuned mass dampers (SATMDs). To determine proper variable damping or stiffness of semi-active devices in each time step, instantaneous optimal control algorithm with clipped control concept has been used. Optimal SATMDs have been designed based on minimization of maximum inter-story drift of nonlinear structure which genetic algorithm(GA) has been used to solve the optimization problem. For numerical analysis, a nonlinear eight-story shear building with bilinear hysteresis material behavior has been used. Fragility curves for the structure equipped with optimal variable damping and stiffness SATMDs have been developed for different performance levels and compared with that of uncontrolled structure as well as structure controlled using passive TMD. Numerical analysis has shown that for most range of intensity measure optimal SATMDs have been effective in enhancement of the seismic fragility of the nonlinear structures which the improvement has been more than passive TMDs. Also, it has been found that, although variable stiffness SATMD shows to be more reliable in lower mass ratios, however in higher mass ratios variable stiffness and damping SATMDs performs similarly to improve reliability of the structure.