Thermal-Mechanical Model for Predicting the Wind and Seismic Response of Viscoelastic Dampers

Abstract

AbstractThis paper presents a simplified coupled thermal-mechanical model for the modelling of viscoelastic dampers with temperature- and frequency-dependent properties subjected to long-term and short-term dynamic loading due to wind and earthquakes. In this numerical model, the self-heating effect caused by molecular-level friction in the viscoelastic (VE) material is captured explicitly using a finite volume thermal diffusion model based only on the physical properties of the steel and VE material. The thermal model is coupled to a single degree of freedom (SDOF) mechanical model, which produces an efficient computational scheme for time-history analyses of VE dampers under both long-term and short-term loading scenarios. The predictions from the proposed model are compared with full-scale experimental results of long-duration wind loading ranging from design level events to extremely rare events, and for shorter but more intense seismic loading scenarios. It is shown that results obtained using this p...