Preventing the Pounding of Adjacent Buildings with Harmony Search Optimized Tuned Mass Damper

摘要

During recent earthquakes, adjacent buildings damaged or collapsed because of impact forces resulting from the collision with each other. In order to prevent this failure, the seismic gap between the structure blocks must be sufficient to let structural displacements during strong ground motions. A lot of buildings with insufficient gaps have been constructed. In order to prevent the pounding of these existing buildings, passive tuned mass damper can be used. In this study, an optimum tuned mass damper (TMD) is proposed for a slender structure surrounded by two structures which are more rigid than it. A metaheuristic algorithm, harmony search was used for the optimization of TMD in order to reduce the relative displacements between the structures to a defined amount of gap. The approach is effective to find the exact TMD parameters for preventing the pounding, so the method is feasible.