Optimal design of inerter-integrated vibration absorbers for seismic retrofitting of a high-rise building in Colombia

Retrofitting of existing buildings with seismic protection devices is an important approach which is commonly adopted by the civil engineering community. This paper investigates the potential of inerter-integrated seismic vibration absorber for building structures. A real case study of a high-rise building in Colombia is considered herein to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed device. An inerter generates a force proportional to the relative acceleration between its two terminals and it fundamentally enlarges the range of realisable passive mechanical impedances. In this work, an interter-integrated device is modelled into the open-source structural engineering software OpenSees and implemented into a simplified two-dimensional (2D) version of the Colombian test-bed structure. The performances of the structure retrofitted with the proposed absorber are compared to those of the same structure retrofitted with a traditional damper device, a more classical retrofitting. This preliminary work demonstrates the effectiveness of the inerter-integrated retrofitting strategies considering the non-structural damage caused by a moderate earthquake. It has been found that with an optimal inerter-integrated device, the maximum inter-storey drift of the building will be reduced by 45.64% comparing with the structure without any retrofitting, which is 20.8% further reduction comparing with the structure retrofitted with an optimal damper. (paper)