Integrated Optimal Design of Viscous Dampers for Seismic Performance of High-Rise Residential Buildings

The past decade has witnessed the great development of super tall residential buildings in China. Optimal design is attracting interests due to the huge energy and material consumption. With the increase of height of modern super tall residential buildings, energy dissipation technologies are widely used to reduce the seismic responses of main structure. As an effective energy dissipation device, viscous damper (VD) can generate damping force by viscosity effects of the viscous liquid. Due to its velocity-dependent nature, viscous dampers can be applied to dissipate seismic energy under different earthquake levels, even frequent earthquake with small seismic responses. VD has been applied in super tall residential buildings, but the integrated optimization of primary structure due to the design redundancy caused by the installation of VD system is commonly not considered in current practices. In this paper, an integrated optimal design method is proposed to improve the stiffness performances through the application of VD system. The integrated optimization of primary structure is also considered in the proposed method. A 250-meter real super-tall residential building project is employed to illustrate the applicability and validity of the integrated optimal seismic performance design method.