Innovative Lateral Resisting Systems with Seismic Protective Dampers and Guideline Design Procedures

Several conventional structures are in need of proper design and construction to resist seismic loads without experiencing a significant amount of damages. Sufficient strength and stiffness of seismic protective devices would eventually reduce the structural vulnerabilities due to the serious damage under seismic loading. There are variations of structural elements with adequate ductility and energy dissipating capability, which could be implemented as structural fuses to reduce the seismic effects, especially for high-rise buildings. For this purpose, dampers are typically used for improving the seismic energy dissipation, the concentration of the damages in a specific part of the system, proving more ductility, and reducing the unpredictable high plastic strains within the structures. In this study, the widely used conventional eccentrically braced systems are considered for further investigations, and the effects of the implementation of the seismic links in multi-story structures are analyzed for multi-story prototype structures by using verified computational models. Subsequently, innovative seismic protective dampers consist of several butterfly-shaped shear links with a linearly varying width between larger ends, and a smaller middle section is introduced. Ultimately, guideline design procedures are developed for redesigning the conventional eccentrically braced frame (EBF) systems with innovative seismic protective dampers, and backbone curves are derived and compared accordingly.