In this paper, the efficacy of magnetorheological (MR) dampers for seismic response reduction is examined. To investigate the performance of the MR damper, a series of experiments was conducted in which the MR damper is used in conjunction with a recently developed clipped-optimal control strategy to control a three story test structure subjected to a one-dimensional ground excitation. The ability of the MR damper to reduce both peak responses, in a series of earthquake tests, and rms responses, in a series of broadband excitation tests is shown. Additionally, because semi-active control systems are nonlinear, a variety of disturbance amplitudes are considered to investigate the performance of this control sytstems over a variety of loading conditions. For each case, the results for three clipped-optimal control designs are presented and compared to the performance of two passive systems. The results indicate that the MR damper is quite effective for structural response reduction over a wide class of seismic excitations.
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