Structural Vibration Reduction Using Gain-Scheduled Fuzzy Control of Magnetorheological Dampers

Fuzzy control has recently been proposed to control the properties of magnetorheological (MR) dampers and therefore reduce vibrations of civil structures subjected to earthquake loads. These controllers have the advantage of not depending on system model, of being simple, and intrinsically robust. Their tuning, however, has shown to be a difficult task. This paper proposes a gain-scheduled fuzzy controller to regulate the damping properties of MR dampers and reduce structural responses of single degree-of-freedom seismically excited structures. Robustness of the algorithm to changes in seismic motions and structural characteristics were assessed by subjecting two different one-story buildings, one rigid and one flexible, to a wide range of earthquake records. Results show that the algorithm proposed effectively reduced responses of both structures to all twenty-four earthquake motions considered. In addition, results were compared to those of a fuzzy controller with constant scaling factors and to those of two passive systems: "passive on" and "passive off", where the current to the MR damper was set at maximum allowable value, and zero, respectively.