OPTIMAL PLACEMENT OF ENERGY-DISSIPATION DEVICES FOR 3-DIMENSIONAL STRUCTURES

In recent years, serious efforts have been undertaken to develop the c oncept of energy dissipation or supplemental damping into a workable t echnology, and a number of these devices have been implemented to stru ctures in the US and elsewhere. As applications of this technology acc elerate, an increasingly important issue is one of positioning these d evices in a structure to maximize their effectiveness at minimum cost. This paper addresses this optimal placement problem when applied to s tructures where both translational and torsional responses are of majo r concern. Optimization procedures due to translation-torsion coupling effects or due to unsymmetrically placed devices are developed and ve rified through numerical examples. The effect of ground motion charact eristics on the positioning of energy dissipation devices is also exam ined. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.