Preliminary design procedure of MR dampers for controlling seismic response of building structures

In this paper, a preliminary design procedure of magnetorheological (MR) dampers is developed for controlling building response induced by seismic excitation. Hysteretic biviscous model which is simple and can describe the hysteretic characteristics of MR damper, is used for parametric studies. The capacity of MR damper is determined as a portion of not the building weight but the lateral restoring force. A method is proposed for the optimal placement and number of MR dampers, and its effectiveness is verified by comparing it with the simplified sequential search algorithm. Numerical results indicate that capacity, number and placement can be reasonably determined using the proposed design procedure.