Hybrid-self-centring damper for industrial structure: Development and experimental validation

The seismic resilience of industrial structures has become an increasingly important issue considering the significant role played by industrial structures in social operation and post-earthquake rescue. This study presented a hybrid-self-centring damper (HSCD) incorporating the variable friction device (VFD) and tapered strip device (TSD) for tunable hysteretic behaviour to improve the seismic resilience of industrial structures. The notion of the proposed HSCD was first illustrated, followed by an experimental study on eight test specimens to understand the behaviour of the proposed damper. The test results confirmed that the proposed HSCD exhibited the expected energy dissipation sequence with excellent self-centring ability. The energy dissipation sequence of the proposed HSCD can be achieved by successive inelasticity consisting of the VFD and TSD, and the hysteretic behaviour can be flexibly adjusted by modulating the essential parameters. Detailed finite element models validated by the experimental results were developed to take insights into the behaviour of the proposed damper. To facilitate the design in the seismic application of the proposed HSCD, the hysteretic model and nonlinear-spring-based simplified model verified by test results were developed to quantify the hysteretic behaviour of the proposed damper.