Viscous Dampers Based Standardized Design of Modular Steel Structures in Different Seismic Zones

Abstract

Modular steel building is now becoming an important trend of construction industry, as it has the advantages of reduced overall construction schedule, improved quality, and reduced resource wastage. And the seismic design is one of the key points of the modular structural design in China. As the components of modular buildings are standardized, the limited classification results in a relatively large span of section size in adjacent levels. If the level of components is adjusted to meet the seismic requirements of high intensity areas, it may lead to a redundancy of structural bearing capacity and result in a waste of materials. Viscous damper (VD) is a kind of speed dependent damper without stiffness. It has the advantages of strong energy dissipation ability, no additional stiffness and multi-performance vibration mitigation. Reasonable arrangements of VD can provide additional damping ratio for the structure and effectively reduce the seismic responses. In this paper, a standardized design method of modular steel structure through the installation of VD in different seismic zones is proposed. The VDs are installed in the primary steel structure to flexibly meet the requirements of different seismic actions using standard structural modules. This study realized automatic optimal VD design by coding design program (C#), which can obtain the optimal parameters, quantity and placements of VD. The feasibility of the proposed method is illustrated by a ten-story steel frame structure.KeywordsModular structureSeismic designViscous damperOptimal design