Process for optimizing location of dampers in a building

Abstract

This thesis is addressing the problem of optimizing the positioning of dampers in a building in order to reduce the cost and achieve a targeted damping for each mode. In order to do so, the thesis is divided into two parts. The first part consists in the study of four traditional configurations of dampers: the diagonal system, the Chevron system, the toggle system and the scissor-jack toggle system. For each configuration the elongation of the damper is calculated without any approximations and the results are used in order to optimize the design of the configuration if it applies, observe its response to horizontal and vertical loading, and extract a linear relationship between the elongation and the perturbation if possible. The second part of the thesis is defining the optimization problem and applying it to a 2D structure as an example.