Seismic Performance of a Novel Configuration of Rotational Friction Damper in X Bracings

Seismic performance of a cruciform rotational friction damper has been evaluated in this article. Horizontal and vertical arms’ length and sliding threshold moment are three adjusting parameters of this device which shall be optimized to assure the damper efficiency. It has been shown that the energy dissipation rate increases for shorter arms due to more relative rotation between frictional contacting surfaces. The best dimensions for friction device arms have been evaluated in this study. A simple method has also been suggested based on static analysis and aiming to find the optimum sliding threshold moment for friction damper implemented at different stories. Closed form solutions of kinetic and kinematic equations of the damper dynamic have been employed on this regard. Dissipaters’ seismic performance indexes have been evaluated through nonlinear dynamic analyses to validate the reliability of the proposed method. It has been shown that the variant values of sliding threshold moment for optimum FD at different stories improves the seismic performance index in comparison with the case of identical devices utilized on all stories. Implementation of identical friction device on all stories may cause inactiveness of the dissipaters on upper stories where the inter-story shear force is not high enough and it acts as ordinary X bracings. The proposed method provides a simple and efficient approach for FD optimum design on different stories of building without multitude of time consuming nonlinear dynamic analyses. According to the dynamic analyses results inconstant optimally designed FDs will be active on all stories while identical FDs may not be sliding at upper stories during the earthquake. Performance of optimally designed FDs has been evaluated for 4, 8 and 12 story buildings under low, medium and high intensity earthquakes. It has been concluded that the proposed dissipater is more effective for high rise buildings and its efficiency increases for severe earthquakes. Although FD utilization on X-braces increases the inter-story drifts; base shear and residual energy considerably decrease. At last it results in 5%-20% improvement in seismic performance index. 3%-6% more reduction in SPI can be achieved using different sliding threshold moments for dampers on each story.