Enhancing performance of buildings in seismic zone with structural metal dampers

Abstract

The performance of buildings in seismic zone is usually more complicated than that in non-seismic zone. The buildings are not only required damage-limited for fully operational after frequent earthquakes, but collapseprevented under rare earthquakes for life safety. Therefore, the buildings in seismic zone require the structure to bear proper stiffness and load-bearing capacity to resist frequent earthquakes, and possess proper ductility and energy-dissipating capacity to prevent collapse due to rare earthquakes as well. Structural metal damper is herein defined as a combination of structural member and energy-dissipating damper. It not only provides stiffness and strength to guarantee the operation of buildings under frequent earthquakes, but also dissipates energy to reduce seismic response to a considerable extent for the purpose of collapse-prevention. Three different structural metal dampers, including buckling-restrained brace (BRB), buckling-restrained steel plate shear wall (BRSW) and steel link elements, are introduced in this paper. BRB is not only a structural brace, but innovatively kept from buckling by using restrainers and its hysteretic curve is improved to be spindle-shape, ideal for dissipating energy to against seismic effects. BRSW is also ideal spindle-shape in hysteretic curve feature and can be used as an excellent structural metal damper. And in order to improve the performance of traditional shear walls and coupled shear walls under earthquakes, steel link elements are introduced. Finally, examples of using various structural metal dampers for buildings in seismic zone are presented.