Investigation of a self-centering frictional energy dissipation outrigger equipped to supertall buildings

Abstract

Outrigger is a typical lateral-force resisting component for supertall buildings, and high-performance outriggers with excellent energy dissipation have been widely studied to enhance the seismic resilience of supertall buildings. However, the residual displacement of the outrigger still limits the rapid repair of the structure after earthquakes. This paper puts forward a self-centering frictional energy dissipation outrigger (SCFO) that consists of self-centering frictional devices (SFDs) and a steel truss in series. A scaled SFD is designed and tested under cyclic loading, and the refined finite element models of the SCFO are established to study their hysteretic performance in detail. Further parametric analysis is conducted to discuss the influence of key parameters, such as strength ratio and stiffness ratio, on the hysteresis characteristics of the SCFO. The results indicate that when the strength and stiffness ratios do not exceed 0.75 and 0.054, respectively, the proposed SCFO has excellent self-centering capacity and stable energy dissipation capacity. The functionality can be restored without repair or requiring only a simple repair after earthquakes.