Among passive seismic energy dissipating devices, steel shear panel damper (SPD) is the widely used in building structure and other civil engineering structures as they are easy to design, installation, maintenance and they are also economical. Numerous studies have been done on the behavior of SPD. The obtained results shows that, the hysteresis loops of SPD under repeated cyclic loading is not stable and due to out-of-plane buckling the hysteresis loops forms pinching at initial displacement. Thus, it is difficult to predict hysteresis behavior of SPD damper clearly. These phenomenon has been the main limitation of shear panel damper and will result in significant effect on the overall structures where the SPD is used.
In order to come up with stable hysteresis loops without pinching, we proposed a novel steel damper called buckling resistance steel damper (BRSD). BRSD addresses the pinching effect limitations of shear panel damper. We came up to the concept of BRSD after identifying both the hysteresis characteristics and buckling behavior along with failure mode of SPD. From the buckling shape and stress and strain distribution, we select the effective part of the panel and cut off the uneffective part and produce an X-shape panel and since the pinching effect on SPD is due to out-of-plane buckling, a cover plate is installed both side of X-shape to restrain the out-of-plane buckling.
In order to evaluate the behavior of proposed steel damper a preliminary finite element analysis have been done. From the preliminary analysis results, the general behavior of BRSD was identified prior to the conduct of loading test. Once the general behavior of BRSD is identified, quasi static loading test considering the gap between cover plate and X-panel as well as the depth-to-thickness (d/t) of X-panel as a main parameters. The accuracy of conducted FE analysis has also been verified by comparing both the deformation shape and hysteresis loops and a pretty good agreement was obtained. Once the FE analysis model is verified, we extend analytical studies to evaluate the effect of more parameters. The effect of all considered parameters of BRSD on initial stiffness, 2nd stiffness, maximum force resisting capacity, cumulative energy dissipating capacity was presented. The performance of BRSD and SPD was compared in order to see the advantage of BRSD over SPD. In addition, time history analysis was conducted by installing the developed damper (BRSD), SPD and with bare dissipating device in 10-story building using perform 3D considering different earthquake inputs. The displacement response, acceleration response story shear force and energy dissipation capacity for all considered cases and considered earthquake inputs are presented.