Smart Outrigger Damper System for Response Reduction of Tall Buildings Subjected to Wind and Seismic Excitations

The outrigger damper system has recently been proposed to reduce the dynamic response of tall buildings subjected to lateral loads. Previous studies have shown that the outrigger damper system could effectively increase the response reduction capacity of tall buildings. The outrigger damper system was used not only for a response reduction of tall buildings, but also for adjusting the differential column shortening. When an outrigger damper system is designed optimally for wind or earthquake loads, it shows good control performance against each target excitation. On the other hand, the outrigger damper system designed for the wind load cannot effectively control the seismic responses and vice versa. This study examined the control performance of a smart outrigger damper system for reducing both the wind and seismic responses. The smart outrigger damper system was comprised of magnetorheological dampers. A fuzzy logic control algorithm, which was optimized by a multi-objective genetic algorithm, was used to control the smart outrigger damper system. Numerical analysis showed that the smart outrigger damper system could provide superior control performance for the reduction of both wind and earthquake responses compared to the general outrigger system and passive outrigger damper system.