Reliability Based Optimal Design of Magnetic Negative Stiffness Damper Based Inerter for Efficient Energy Harvesting

This study proposes a magnetic negative stiffness damper-based inerter (MNSDI) for mitigating wind-induced vibration of tall structures and energy harvesting. The proposed control system has a nonlinear magnetic negative stiffness damper which does not add any additional stiffness into the combined system by which the adjoining members of the proposed control system do not experience any additional force demand. Due to the movement of the magnets inside a conductive pipe, MNSDI introduces eddy current damping into the structural system. An electromagnetic transducer is attached to MNSDI to convert vibrational energy to electrical energy. As the proposed system is a passive damper, the design parameters related to the damper are needed to estimate before installation. In this context, a reliability-based design optimization (RBDO) is used to estimate the design parameters of MNSDI, so that maximum energy harvesting can be achieved. As the RBDO framework is computationally expensive, Kriging is used as a surrogate model. For the numerical demonstration, a 76-storys high-rise benchmark building is considered. The stationary wind loads are used where fluctuating components of wind loads are simulated from the Davenport spectrum. The numerical results show the effectiveness of the proposed control system to reduce the structural vibration as well as enhance its energy harvesting capability simultaneously.