ACTIVE AND SEMI‐ACTIVE CONTROL OF STRUCTURES UNDER SEISMIC EXCITATION

Considerable effort has been devoted to develop passive and active methods for reducing structural response under seismic excitations. Passive control approaches have already found application in practice. Active control methods, on the other hand, are being vigorously examined for application to civil structures. This paper investigates the application of active and semi-active control schemes to structures subjected to seismic excitations, and it focuses on the use of the sliding-mode control approach for the development of the control algorithms. The possibility of control redundancy with respect to the number of sliding constraints is taken into account in the controller design. Several sets of numerical results are obtained for a realistic 10-storey shear building, subjected to earthquake-induced ground motions and controlled by active or semi-active control schemes. It is observed that both active and semi-active control schemes can be used to reduce the dynamic response. Active control performs very effectively in reducing the structural response, but the required control force values can be quite large to limit its practical application in the case of large and massive buildings. Active regulation of linear viscous dampers was found unnecessary for this type of structural system, as it did not induce any significantly more reduction in the response than the dampers acting passively. On the other hand, it is shown that active regulation of stiffness can be used with advantage to reduce the response. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.