Structural safety redundancy-based design method for structure with viscous dampers

Abstract

A simple design process is proposed for supplemental viscous dampers based on structural safety redundancy. In this process, the safety redundancy of the primary structure without a damper is assessed by the capacity and response spectra. The required damping ratio that should be provided by the supplemental dampers is estimated by taking the structural safety redundancy as a design target. The arrangement of dampers is determined according to the drift distribution obtained by performing pushover analysis. A benchmark model is used to illustrate and verify the validity of this design process. The results show that the structural safety redundancy of the structure provided by the viscous dampers increases to approximately twice that of the structure without a damper and is close to the design target. Compared with the existing design methods, the proposed process can estimate the elastic-plastic response of a structure more easily by using static calculation, and determine the required damping ratio more directly without iterative calculation or graphical process. It can be concluded that the proposed process is simple and effective.