Experimental and numerical investigations of a staged energy dissipation device

Abstract

Energy-dissipating devices (EDDs) are widely used in building structures to mitigate seismic disasters. This study designed a fully assembled friction-metal series damper which is one kind of the staged energy dissipation devices (SEDD). Quasi-static tests were conducted to examine the behaviour of the SEDDs. The influence of factors such as the configurations of the restrainers, pre-tightening force, and material of the metal strip module was investigated. The work behaviour of the SEDD consists of three stages: elastic, frictional energy dissipation, and metallic elastic–plastic energy dissipation stages. The experimental results verified the effectiveness of the predicted working mechanism and showed that the bearing capacity and energy dissipation of the SEDD increased with the configuration of the restrainers, pre-tightening force, and yield strength of the metal strip module. The experiment also showed that the rotation of the outer plates caused an unexpected force mode in the metal strip module. Subsequently, numerical models of the test specimens were built, and good agreement was observed between the numerical simulations and test results for the hysteresis performance, loading capacity, and stress distribution. To further improve the mechanical properties of the SEDD, an optimised model was established and studied. The SEDDs with optimised strip shapes and constraint conditions of the outer plate exhibited better mechanical performance, and their load capacities increased by 11 % and 41 %, respectively.