Seismic Analysis of RC Buildings Using X-Braced and Inverted V-Braced Friction Dampers

Earthquakes as a sudden rupture phenomenon have always been one of the most challenging design criteria for structural engineers around the globe. The disaster caused by the earthquake not only ruins buildings, cities, and roads but also leaves big financial loss, and puts human life at serious risk. The collapse of structures due to earthquake motions amplified concerns of structural engineers in finding more accomplished techniques for dissolving the released energy of earthquakes by structures. Structure vibration is the main concern of structural engineers. The inevitable occurrence of earthquakes and imposing plenty of damage lead to finding a proper and trustworthy solution to encounter this natural phenomenon. Passive energy dissipation systems have been successfully implemented in buildings around the world to reduce the structural response, principally due to earthquakes. The damping effect on the system is obtained without any external loading and the performance of these is achieved by the earthquake excitation. A friction damper is a kind of passive damper that dissipates the induced energy by a displacement control mechanism. In this study, 7-story reinforced concrete buildings are designed and modeled in SAP2000 software to investigate the effectiveness of the building with friction dampers. The nonlinear time-history analysis has been performed using various earthquake ground motion records for three different layout configurations as moment-resisting frames with and without X-braced and inverted V-braced friction dampers. Maximum story drifts and base shear forces are determined. In this study, earthquake acceleration records were applied simultaneously in both directions (x, y) of the structure while performing nonlinear time-history earthquake analyses. The results show that buildings with friction damper configurations showed good performance under all the selected earthquakes. The buildings with X-braced friction dampers configurations indicated better performance than the other configurations.