An experimental study of MR dampers for seismic protection

In this paper, the efficacy of magnetorheological (MR) dampers for seismic response reduction is examined. To investigate the performance of the MR damper, a series of experiments was conducted in which the MR damper is used in conjunction with a recently developed clipped-optimal control strategy to control a three-story test structure subjected to a one-dimensional ground excitation. The ability of the MR damper to reduce both peak responses, in a series of earthquake tests, and rms responses, in a series of broadband excitation tests, is shown. Additionally, because semi-active control systems are nonlinear, a variety of disturbance amplitudes are considered to investigate the performance of this control system over a variety of loading conditions. For each case, the results for three clipped-optimal control designs are presented and compared to the performance of two passive systems. The results indicate that the MR damper is quite effective for structural response reduction over a wide class of seismic excitations.