Optimal Viscous Damper Placement for Elastic-Plastic MDOF Structures Under Critical Double Impulse

A new method for optimal viscous damper placement is proposed for elastic-plastic multi-degree-of-freedom (MDOF) structures subjected to the critical double impulse as a representative of near-fault ground motions. The double impulse consists of two impulses with different directions and the critical interval between those two impulses is characterized by the criterion on the maximum input energy that is expected to lead to the maximum deformation. The critical timing of the second impulse is the timing at which the sum of the restoring force and the damping force in the first story attains zero. The objective function and constraint in terms of the maximum interstory drift along the building height or the sum of the maximum interstory drifts in all stories are selected and the corresponding optimization algorithm based on time-history response analysis and sensitivity analysis is investigated. Since the objective function in terms of the sum of the maximum interstory drifts in all stories is superior to the objective function in terms of the maximum interstory drift along the building height, it is employed in this paper. A new concept of double impulse pushover (DIP) is proposed for determining the input velocity level of the critical double impulse. It is demonstrated that the combination of two algorithms, one for effective reduction of the overflowed maximum interstory drift via the concentrated allocation of dampers and the other for effective allocation of dampers via the use of stable objective function, is effective for finding a stable optimal damper placement.