Structural active vibration control using active mass damper by block pulse functions

Active vibration control is one of the most efficient systems to mitigate excessive vibrations by providing significantly superior supplemental damping in civil engineering structures. One of the most challenging components of active control is development of an accurate analytical approach with minor computational expenses. Active mass damper (AMD) is one of the most commonly used active control devices, including a mass-spring-damper system with an actuator to increase the amount of damping in structures. Block pulse functions have been studied and applied frequently in recent years as a basic set of functions for signal characterizations in systems science and control. The purpose of this study is to establish an innovative method by using block pulse functions to minimize expenses of computations. Numerical simulations of earthquake-excited 10-story shear buildings equipped with an active mass damper are provided to verify the validity and feasibility of the proposed method. The proposed method's uncontrolled and controlled responses of structural system are compared with linear quadratic regulator method's results. The results reveal the proposed method can be beneficial in reducing seismic responses of structures with less computational expenses and high accuracy.