Performance based optimal seismic retrofitting of yielding plane frames using added viscous damping

This paper is concerned with the optimal seismic design of added viscous dampers in yielding plane frames. The total added damping is minimized for allowable values of local performance indices under the excitation of an ensemble of ground motions in both regular and irregular structures. The local performance indices are taken as the maximal inter-story drift of each story and/or the normalized hysteretic energy dissipated at each of the plastic hinges. Gradients of the constraints with respect to the design variables (damping coefficients) are derived, via optimal control theory, to enable an efficient first order optimization scheme to be used for the solution of the problem. An example of a ten story three bay frame is presented. This example reveals the following