Low-Damage Seismic Design of RC Buildings with Supplemental Energy Dissipation Systems

Structural damage during a seismic event, of traditionally designed buildings is inevitable. Although seismic design based on capacity design philosophy, prevents brittle collapse of a structure; it does not ensure an operational state of the structure after an earthquake event. This highlights a mismatch between societal expectations and actual seismic performance of a structure, designed with standard design procedures available currently. To minimise seismic demand on primary structure and to achieve stringent seismic performance objectives, using supplemental energy dissipation (SED) systems in primary structure is now becoming commonplace. The study presented here evaluates structural performance of RC frames with SED devices. A displacement based seismic design method is used for specifying the properties of SED devices. The SED devices designed here are based on viscous and metal hysteretic mechanisms. Four earthquake time history sets are used to represent seismic demand on the modelled RC frame. Displacements at nodes, force actions in structural members, and residual displacements obtained from nonlinear dynamic analyses are used as seismic response parameters. Additionally seismic energy dissipation of RC frames by virtue of plastic rotations in structural members is evaluated and presented as a parameter representing structural damage. A considerable reduction in seismic response is noted with use of both SED devices. It is inferred from the present study that, a low-damage, earthquake resilient performance can be obtained for RC frames using SED systems.