An Energy-Based Seismic Design Procedure with Damage Control for Frames with Linear and Non-linear Fluid Viscous Dampers

Recent tendencies in earthquake engineering have as one of their main goals for the rehabilitation of existing and the design of new buildings to guarantee acceptable level of resilience are when they are subject to design demands during their life cycle. To fulfil this goals and guarantee the seismic performance of structures by controlling the dissipation energy the use of fluid viscous dampers is an excellent design alternative. Most of the seismic design procedures currently used in practice accept that a small or no part of the dissipated energy must be is due to hysteresis with the larger part must be absorbed by protective devices. This may not be the most appropriate, as the seismic demands of current design codes have increased by up to 25%, implicitly implying that larger and/or more devices would be required, which would directly impact the cost of structure. To overcome this problem, this paper presents an approximate seismic energy-based design procedure for new and existing structures equipped with linear and non-linear viscous dampers, in which a balance between supplementary damping and damage to the structure is considered. The framework of the design procedure proposed is based on the concept that the performance of a multiple degree of freedom structure may be approximated from the performance of a reference single degree of freedom system, with properties generally those of the fundamental mode of the structure. To illustrate the application of the procedure proposed four regular plane frames: 8, 12, 17, and 20-storey were designed. From the analysis and discussion of the results obtained, it is concluded that the procedure proposed allows the design of structures equipped with viscous dampers that satisfy a design objective.