Chaotic behaviour in the non-linear optimal control of unilaterally contacting building systems during earthquakes

The paper presents a new numerical approach for a non-linear optimal control problem arising in earthquake civil engineering. This problem concerns the elastoplastic softening-fracturing unilateral contact between neighbouring buildings during earthquakes when Coulomb friction is taken into account under second-order instabilizing effects. So, the earthquake response of the adjacent structures can appear instabilities and chaotic behaviour. The problem formulation presented here leads to a set of equations and inequalities, which is equivalent to a dynamic hemivariational inequality in the way introduced by Panagiotopoulos [Hemivariational Inequalities. Applications in Mechanics and Engineering, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1993]. The numerical procedure is based on an incremental problem formulation and on a double discretization, in space by the finite element method and in time by the Wilson- method. The generally non-convex constitutive contact laws are piecewise linearized, and in each time-step a non-convex linear complementarity problem is solved with a reduced number of unknowns.