Hysteretic behavior of replaceable steel plate damper for prefabricated joint with earthquake resilience

Prefabricated structures are widely used in civil infrastructure, attributed to the advantages of environmental sustainability, easy in-situ operation, short construction period and low-cost. Beam-to-column connection is the critical component for the structural integrity of prefabricated structures, and the failure of beam-to-column connection might lead to structural progressive collapse under earthquakes. In this paper, a novel dual-functional replaceable steel plate damper was proposed for prefabricated beam-to-column joints to improve the mechanical behavior and earthquake resilience. The influence of different configurations for steel plate damper on the hysteretic behavior was analyzed experimentally and numerically. Results obtained from experimental and numerical research demonstrated that proposed steel plate damper successfully developed desired mechanical behavior. Moreover, the influence of different configuration details including width-to-thickness ratio of steel plates, weakened length and width of steel plates, gap between weakened steel plates and constrained steel sleeves, were investigated to optimize the mechanical behavior of steel plate damper, and the favorable construction configurations were recommended based on parametric analysis. In the end, the hysteretic constitutive model for steel plate damper was proposed based on considerable numerical analysis on FEA models and verified by means of comparisons between theoretical results, experimental results and numerical analysis.