Model Reference Predictive Control Method for Building Mass Damper

A building mass damper (BMD) is used to suppress structural responses of high-rise buildings. In a building with BMD, the upper and lower structures are connected by a “connecting layer,” and the BMD utilizes the upper structure as a tuned mass damper. Because a BMD uses part of a building, an elevator may be installed through the connecting layer. Thus, the displacement of the connecting layer must be small so that the elevator can operate during strong winds or small earthquakes. To achieve this, the initial stiffness of the connecting layer is large which results in the BMD not being optimally tuned to the lower structure and having less-than-optimal damping effect during small earthquakes. Therefore, in this study, an active mass damper (AMD) was installed on the suboptimal BMD, and the AMD was designed with model reference predictive control (MRPC), which compensates for the reduced damping effect of the suboptimal BMD, especially during small earthquakes. In the MRPC method, the response of the control target (the building with a suboptimal BMD) and the reference model (the optimal BMD) are predicted, and the control input is calculated to minimize the difference between them. In this paper, first, the proposed method is formulated and explained. Second, an experiment performed to verify the method is described. In this experiment, the model used was a six-story building that employed a BMD and an AMD. The results of the experiment verified the validity of the method.