Abstract
The usefulness of energy dissipation devices to reduce seismic response of structures is now well established. For a given installation of such devices in a structure, one can easily compute the level of response reduction achieved. However, the solution of an inverse problem of how many devices one would need to achieve a desired level of response reduction in a structure, or to achieve an expected level of performance from a structural system, is not quite as straightforward and well formulated. In this paper, a method is presented to obtain the amount of viscous and viscoβelastic damping one would need to obtain a desired level of response reduction. The needed supplemental devices are also optimally distributed in the structure to achieve the best performance. To solve the optimal problem, a gradientβbased optimization approach is used. To illustrate the application, numerical results for a 24βstorey building structure are presented where the objective is to achieve the maximum reduction in the performance functions expressed in terms of the interβstorey drifts, base shear, or floor accelerations. Other forms of performance functions can also be treated similarly. Copyright Β© 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.