A Comparative Study of Seismic Retrofitting of a Steel Benchmark Structure Using Various Types of Passive Controllers

New technologies involving passive control devices have matured to the level of practical use. Although such devices may have the ability to reduce inter-story drifts and absolute accelerations, the two main measures for structural and non-structural damage, the variety of types of devices raises an important question: What type of device is best suited for reducing either absolute acceleration or inter-story drift, or simultaneously reducing both? In order to rigorously answer this question, we adopted an evolutionary, multi-objective optimization approach, wherein inter-story drifts and absolute accelerations served as objective functions. We estimated the set of all Pareto optimal solutions for retrofitting typical medium-rise framed structures by considering different configurations and types of passive energy dissipation (PED) devices. The results of numerical simulations indicate that some types of PED devices show superior performance in comparison to others. These findings could assist designers with a robust choice of PED device types, configurations, and sizes to address specific design problems.