Active mass damper system for high-rise buildings using neural oscillator and position controller: sinusoidally varying desired displacement of auxiliary mass intended for reduction of maximum control force

Reducing vibration of high-rise structures under earthquake load has been the subject of considerable efforts in Japan. Relevant researches about vibration energy dissipation devices for buildings have been undertaken. An active mass damper is one of the well-known vibration control devices. Despite the accumulation of much knowledge of control design methods for the system, application of the devices to high-rise structures under earthquake load is challenging, because the active mass dampers have one serious disadvantage about stroke limitation of the auxiliary mass. In this study, we have proposed a new control system, which had a neural oscillator and position controller, to solve this problem. The objective of this paper is to improve the vibration control performance of the proposed active mass damper system. The previous method generated rectangular waves as the desired displacement, whose amplitude is varied in accordance with the vibration responses of a structure excited by earthquakes. Furthermore, the gains of the position controller, which derives the auxiliary mass to the desired displacement, have been designed in consideration of response reduction of the structure. However, the generated rectangular desired displacement was not adequate to reduce the maximum acceleration responses of the structure, because the driving force for the auxiliary mass generates excessive amounts of acceleration as the direction of the desired displacement is switched. Thus, this paper proposes a new method, which generates sinusoidal varying desired displacement for the auxiliary mass of the active mass damper system to reduce the acceleration response of structures. The results of numerical simulation showed that the proposed method in this work was effective for improving the control performance.