Effectiveness of a fuzzy controller on the damage index of nonlinear benchmark buildings

In this paper, a semi-active control method for seismically excited nonlinear benchmarkbuildings equipped with controllable fluid viscous dampers is presented and evaluated. a fuzzy logiccontroller (flc) is designed to alter the damping coefficient of controllable viscous dampers during anearthquake. a genetic algorithm (ga) is employed to find optimum fuzzy controller rules, as well asadjusting the membership functions to minimize the overall damage index. this combination of a geneticalgorithm and a fuzzy logic controller (gflc) is also used to minimize the peak value of the top storydisplacement response, in order to verify the effectiveness of minimizing displacement on the damageindex. the effectiveness of the flc is verified and illustrated using the simulated response of 3-storyand 20-story full-scale nonlinear benchmark buildings excited by several historical earthquake records,through a computer simulation on matlab. for comparison, a linear quadratic gaussian (lqg) activecontroller is designed to minimize the peak value of the top story displacement response. moreover, theresults of a study that has used self-organizing fuzzy logic controllers (soflc) with active actuators areused. the results demonstrate that the gflcs are quite effective in overall damage reduction for a widerange of motions, compared with the soflc and lqg controllers.