• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.11 no.1 s.53
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• pp.11-19
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• 2007

This paper proposes an optimal design method of distribution and capacities of linear viscous dampers for vibration control of two adjacent buildings. The previous researches have dealt with suboptimal design problem under the assumption that linear viscous dampers are distributed uniformly or proportionally to the sensitivity of the modal damping ratio according to floors, whereas this study deals with global optimization problem in which the damping capacities of each floor are independently selected as design parameters. For this purpose, genetic algorithm to effectively search multiple design variables in large searching domains is adopted and objective function leading to the global optimal solutions is established through the comparison of several optimal design values obtained from different objective functions with control performance and damping capacity. The effectiveness of the proposed method is investigated by comparing the control performance and total damping capacity designed by the proposed method with those of the previous method. In addition, the time history analyses are performed by using three historical earthquakes with different frequency contents, and the simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method is an effective seismic design method for the vibration control of the adjacent structures.