Simultaneous optimal damper placement using oil, hysteretic and inertial mass dampers

Oil, hysteretic and inertial mass dampers are representatives of passive dampers used for smart enhancement of seismic performance of building structures. Since oil dampers have a nonlinear relief mechanism and hysteretic dampers possess nonlinear restoring-force characteristics, several difficulties arise in the evaluation of buildings including such dampers. The purpose of this paper is to propose a practical method for simultaneous optimal use of such dampers. The optimum design problem is formulated so as to minimize the maximum interstory drift under design earthquakes in terms of a set of damper quantities subject to an equality constraint on the total cost of dampers. The proposed method to solve the optimum design problem is a successive procedure which consists of two steps. The first step is a sensitivity analysis by using nonlinear time-history response analyses, and the second step is a modification of the set of damper quantities based upon the sensitivity analysis. Numerical examples are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and validity of the proposed design method.