Experimental study on the optimized design of butterfly-shaped dampers

Structural fuses are manufactured from oriented steel plates for use in seismic protective systems to withstand significant lateral shear loads. These systems are designed and detailed for concentrating the damage and excessive inelastic deformations in the desired location along the length of the fuse to prevent the crack propagation and structural issues for the surrounding elements. Among a number of structural systems with engineered - cut-outs, a recently developed butterfly-shaped structural fuses are proposed to better align the bending strength along the length of the fuse with the demand moment, enhancing controlled yielding features over the brittle behavior. Previously, the design methodologies were developed purely based on the flexural stresses’ or shear stresses’ behavior leading to underestimate or overestimate the structural capacity of the fuses. The aim of this study is to optimize the design methodologies for commonly used butterfly-shaped dampers through experimental investigations considering the stresses are not uniformly distributed stresses along the length of the fuse system. The effect of shear and flexural stresses on the behavior of butterfly-shaped are initially formulated based on the Von-Mises criterion, and the optimized geometry is specified. Subsequently, experimental tests are developed for evaluating the optimized design concepts for butterfly-shaped dampers considering the uniform stress distribution and efficient use of steel. It is shown that butterfly-shaped dampers are capable of full cyclic hysteric behavior without any major signs of strength or stiffness degradations.