The Effect of Viscous Dampers in Seismic Retrofitting of Steel Buildings

The target of seismic improvement of a building is to strengthen the structural and non-structural members in order to reduce the earthquake damage. Dampers dissipate the structure’s energy.By using these types ofequipment,the damage to the structure is dramatically reduced. In this article steel frames with three, six and ten stories with and withoutdampers aremodeled in SAP software.They are evaluated by using seismic retrofitting guidelinesand nonlinear static method. The results show that adding a viscous damper reduces seismic effect and damage performancelevel.In addition, using dampersin high-rise structures is more effective than shorter ones in reducing the effects of an earthquake.