Optimal Seismic Control of Steel Bridges by Single and Multiple Tuned Mass Dampers Using Charged System Search

Tuned mass dampers are common solutions for passive control of bridge responses against dynamic loads. The present work concerns multiple-support seismic excitation as the source of dynamic loading and studies TMD performance in controlling consequent vertical response of simply supported steel bridges. TMD parameter optimization is treated as the first issue, utilizing the well-known charged system search where the dynamic structural constraints are evaluated via rigorous time-history finite element analyses. As another issue, superiority of multiple TMD over single TMD is investigated for the present problem after unifying their parameters via optimization. Treating a bridge model as the case study under a number of real-world recorded earthquakes, the error of uniform support excitation under such a non-uniform case is also evaluated. Superior efficiency of the utilized charged system search over popular genetic algorithm is shown for this problem. The results also revealed that how advantageous is optimally designed multiple TMD in controlling vibration modes of such a distributed-mass structural system.