Ground motion pulse‐based active control of a linear base‐isolated benchmark building

In this paper, the performance of different active controllers, including an active with pulse filter (APF) controller, in which the controller is designed using a ground motion pulse filter recently proposed by the authors, has been investigated for the benchmark base-isolated building model subject to various near-field ground motions. The pulse model utilizes pulse period, pulse damping factor and pulse shape factor from recorded ground motions to represent dominant kinematic characteristics of actual near-field ground motion pulses. Comparison of various active control approaches, such as linear quadratic gaussian (LQG), LQG with Kanai–Tajimi filter, APF and sample controller, demonstrates that the APF controller is capable of reducing base displacement (drift of isolators), superstructure drift and absolute accelerations of all the floors simultaneously while using the same control force level as other controllers. The reduction in all these response quantities is much more significant for the APF controller than other active control strategies. The peak amplitudes of various response quantities of the structure with APF controller are damped much faster than those with the sample controller. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.