Investigating the Effect of Accordion Thin Walled Dampers on Reducing the Response of Frames Subjected to Blast Loading

Blast can cause progressive damage or complete damage in structures. Designing the structures for blast is so expensive and infeasible; hence, it is better to use the dampers for increasing the structure explosive resistance. The purpose of this research is to evaluate the behavior of steel frames equipped with steel accordion dampers under blast loading. Two types of frames, one with damper and one without that, have been studied to evaluate the effect of damper. The studied steel frames have been considered as single span with different heights (1 and 4 stories) impacted by two types of blast load with different values. For this purpose, non-linear dynamic analysis on different frames was conducted using ABAQUS software. The study showed that utilizing thin-wall accordion dampers remarkably improves the overall displacement of the frame, especially during intense blasts. The maximum reduction in displacement of 1-story frame for the top of column at the side close to blast under explosive load of 36 kg/cm2 is about 98% and the reduction is 21% for the middle of this column. For the four-story frame, the most displacement reduction about 64% was obtained at the forth story level and the reduction reaches 55% at the third story.