Electromechanical seismic control of buildings using negative-capacitance piezoelectric shunts

Seismic vibration control in civil structures has increasingly focused on adaptive and electromechanical strategies to enhance structural performance. In this context, piezoelectric shunt techniques have emerged as a promising approach, as they enable tuning of the dynamic properties of the coupled electromechanical system through external electrical circuits. This provides a more flexible and practical alternative to conventional mechanical modifications based on fixed structural parameters. However, studies addressing the feasibility and application of such systems for the seismic protection of multi-story buildings remain limited. This paper investigates the feasibility of seismic vibration control of multi-story buildings using interstory piezoelectric transducers connected to resonant shunt circuits with negative capacitance (NC). The proposed configuration enables frequency-dependent modifications of effective stiffness and damping through enhanced electromechanical coupling. A coupled structural–electrical model is formulated for shear-building representations, incorporating resistive-inductive (RL)–NC shunt circuits and residual capacitance effects under stability constraints. The methodology is evaluated using four benchmark buildings (5-, 6-, 8-, and 10-story structures) subjected to a suite of recorded earthquake ground motions from the PEER NGA-West2 database, including near-fault records with potentially pulse-like characteristics and far-field excitations. Performance is assessed through frequency-response characterization and time-domain simulations under transient seismic loading. In addition, time–frequency spectrograms are employed to analyze the evolution of structural response and to highlight the influence of the NC-shunted configuration on dominant frequency bands. The numerical results demonstrate systematic reductions in the vicinity of the dominant frequency response function (FRF) peaks, with a mean amplitude attenuation of 22.73% across the benchmark uncontrolled structures. Lower global peak relative accelerations and faster decay of the dominant response components accompany these improvements. Overall, within the adopted nominal reduced-order framework, NC-enhanced piezoelectric shunts are shown to provide a promising and tunable electromechanical concept for seismic vibration mitigation in multi-story structures.