Critical Control of Building under Seismic Disturbance

Abstract

The control of a building subject to a seismic disturbance is critical in the sense that the drift in each interstorey is required to remain strictly within a prescribed bound, despite any earthquake excitation. This is because any violation of the bound can lead to the collapse of the building. This chapter describes the design of such a control system using the principle of matching and the method of inequalities, where all earthquakes supposed to be possible to happen are explicitly taken into account and are modelled as functions such that the two norms of the magnitude and rate of change are uniformly bounded by respective constants. As a result, one can ensure that (provided a design solution is found) the building is tolerant to all the earthquakes that can be modelled in this way. A design is carried out for the case of a six storey laboratory-scaled building. The numerical results demonstrate that the design framework employed here gives a realistic formulation of the design problem and therefore is suitable for designing critical systems in practice.