This study firstly proposes some representative simple methods to obtain the suboptimal passive damping and stiffness parameters from the optimal control gain matrix since it is not possible to add the exact optimal damping and stiffness parameters to the structure in practice. It is shown numerically that modifying the structural damping and the stiffness in the proposed suboptimal ways may suppress the uncontrolled vibrations while the performance levels depend on the seismic inputs. Since the proposed approach is intrinsically passive and has no adaptive property against changing dynamic effects, this study secondly proposes a new performance index so that the mechanical energy of the structure, control and the seismic energies are considered simultaneously in the minimization procedure. The implementation of the resulting closedloop control algorithm does not require both a priori knowledge of the seismic excitation and the solution of the nonlinear matrix Riccati equation. The performance of the proposed approach is investigated, e.g., structures subjected to three seismic inputs and compared to the performance of the uncontrolled, the classical linear optimal control, and the passive cases. It is shown by the numerical simulation results that the proposed algorithm is capable of suppressing the uncontrolled seismic structural displacements and the absolute accelerations simultaneously and performs almost as well as the classical linear optimal control in reducing the displacements with comparable control effort and performs better than the classical linear optimal control in reducing the absolute accelerations. The results show that while the proposed active approach has similar performance to the classical linear optimal control, the classical linear optimal control increases the absolute accelerations slightly compared to the proposed active approach in regulating displacements, while the proposed active approach regulates and reduces both displacements and absolute accelerations. The proposed approach is promising in protecting both the structural and non-structural members from the seismic forces since a simultaneous reduction both in the displacements and the absolute accelerations is achieved.C 2012 Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering.

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In this paper, an instantaneous optimal control performance index for active control of structures under seismic excitation is analytically proposed. Absolute velocity and absolute displacement terms are implemented to the conventional state vector terms and eventually to the resulting performance index expression. The seismic response reduction effectiveness of the proposed performance index is compared with the linear quadratic regulator control (LQR). For numerical verification of the performance index, an eight-story shear building with a fully active tendon controller system under unidirectional earthquake is considered as the first example. For a more complex model, a three-dimensional tier building under the effect of bidirectional earthquakes is selected as second numerical example. Unidirectional near fault and bidirectional near fault earthquakes are used in the simulations. The control energy demand of each control method is also considered in the comparison. It is obtained from numerical simulations that the proposed performance index is as effective as LQR in attenuating structural vibrations. However, the resulting performance index does not require a priori knowledge of the seismic excitation like the LQR. The nonlinear Riccati matrix equation solution of the LQR is not required in the proposed performance index as well.

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