Vibration control of tall buildings

Objectionable vibrations have been experienced in modern tall buildings. To alleviate the vibrations one may increase the structural stiffness and damping or use a passive control device such as a ‘tuned mass damper’. The drawback of the above mentioned methods is the greatly increased cost. An alternative approach is to use active control devices providing control forces based on the feed back control theory. This paper presents a systematic approach of first reducing a multistorey structure to a simpler equivalent system. Then a pole placement method is developed to obtain the conrol forces. A successive approximation method is used to reduce the responses to permissible magnitudes. An example is presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the method.