SEISMIC DESIGN OF SHEAR-TYPE BUILDINGS WITH MAXWELL MODEL-BASED NONLINEAR DAMPER-BRACE SYSTEMS

In this paper, a procedure to design a shear-type building with supplementary Maxwell model-based nonlinear damper-brace systems for achieving a target performance is proposed. In the proposed procedure, a numerical time-stepping method is developed to compute the response of the damper-brace system and the building under earthquake excitations. The effects of different design parameters have been preliminary investigated by a simple structure with a nonlinear damper-brace assembly. Results indicate that, to satisfy a set performance index, there exist non-unique solutions with many possible combinations of the design parameters; however, a minimum brace stiffness will be required to achieve the desired structural performance. Moreover, for a given brace stiffness, the optimal damping coefficient can be uniquely determined if the nonlinear velocity exponent is preset. Results also show that, for achieving the same structural performance, the use of a nonlinear damper with velocity exponent less than 1 can reduce a considerable amount of damping originally required for the use of a linear damper. The proposed procedure will be shown to be easily extendable to multi-degree-of-freedom (MDOF) structures with multiple nonlinear damper-brace systems.