Robust design of liquid column vibration absorber in seismic vibration mitigation considering random system parameter

The optimum design of liquid column dampers in seismic vibration control considering system parameter uncertainty is usually performed by minimizing the unconditional response of a structure without any consideration to the variation of damper performance due to uncertainty. However, the system so designed may be sensitive to the variations of input system parameters due to uncertainty. The present study is concerned with robust design optimization (RDO) of liquid column vibration absorber (LCVA) considering random system parameters characterizing the primary structure and ground motion model. The RDO is obtained by minimizing the weighted sum of the mean value of the root mean square displacement of the primary structure as well as its standard deviation. A numerical study elucidates the importance of the RDO procedure for design of LCVA system by comparing the RDO results with the results obtained by the conventional stochastic structural optimization procedure and the unconditional response based optimization.