Hybrid self-centering companion spines for structural and nonstructural damage control

This paper intends to develop a new lateral force-resisting system – the hybrid self-centering companion spines system (denoted as the HSCS system) – for obtaining better seismic resilience by controlling both structural and nonstructural damage. The HSCS system consists of two rigid spines pinned to the ground and several hybrid dampers. The two rigid spines can facilitate the structure to avoid soft-story mechanisms and control higher mode responses by promoting uniform inter-story drift distribution under strong earthquakes. The hybrid damper is made of a friction spring damper and a viscous damper in parallel and provides the self-centering feature, energy-absorbing capacity, and acceleration- and velocity-control capacity for reducing structural and nonstructural damage. A performance-based design (PBD) procedure was developed for the HSCS system based on the concept of the direct displacement-based design method. The three-story and six-story demonstration buildings were considered in this study to investigate the seismic performance of steel buildings equipped with the proposed HSCS systems. Four designs with different design parameters were performed for the demonstration buildings based on the proposed PBD procedure. The three- and six-story self-centering companion spines systems (denoted as SCS systems) were considered for highlighting the benefits of adopting HSCS systems. Nonlinear dynamic analyses were conducted to evaluate the structural and nonstructural damage of the designed buildings under earthquakes. The analysis results indicate that the designed HSCS systems can achieve the desired performance objective and nonlinear behavior under dynamic excitations. The HSCS systems can show excellent structural damage control performance and post-earthquake recoverability by controlling the residual inter-story drift much smaller than 0.2% even under MCE excitations. The excellent nonstructural damage control capacity can be also observed in the designed HSCS systems, while most of the nonstructural components are only slightly damaged even under MCE excitations. Moreover, the HSCS systems can achieve smaller absolute floor acceleration and floor velocity responses than SCS systems under both DBE and MCE although they are designed to achieve similar maximum inter-story drift responses under DBE.