Abstract
This study proposes a new vibration control approach for adjacent twin structures, which is termed as viscous damper asymmetric coupling system in this paper. The proposed system takes a concept that the diagonal bracing viscous dampers are asymmetrically distributed in two buildings to break the behavior symmetry of the twin buildings and then the coupling viscous damper is additionally installed at the top floor of the two buildings to couple both buildings and interactively transfer the asymmetric behavior-caused damping forces into both buildings. These asymmetric damping distributions and interacting damping forces of the connection damper efficiently suppress the overall vibration of the damper-coupled adjacent twin buildings efficiently. Genetic algorithm (GA) based multi-objective optimization technique is adopted for optimal design of the proposed system. In the numerical example of adjacent twin 10-story building structures, the conventional control approach, that is, uniform damping distribution system (UDS) is also taken into account for comparison purpose. The optimization results verify that the proposed system either can improve the control performance over the UDS with the same damping capacity, or can save the damping capacity significantly while maintaining the similar level of control performance to the UDS.