Seismic Vulnerability Assessment of Steel Special Moment Frames having Superelastic Viscous Damper

The superelastic viscous damper (SVD) relies on shape memory alloy (SMA) cables for re-centering capability and employs a viscoelastic (VE) damper that consists of two layers of a high damped (HD) blended butyl elastomer compound to augment its energy dissipation capacity. An analytical model of a five-story and nine-story steel special moment frames building with the installed SVDs and BRBs are developed to determine the dynamic response of the structure. Nonlinear response history analyses are conducted to evaluate the behavior of controlled and uncontrolled buildings under 44 ground motion records. All the buildings are subjected to incremental dynamic analysis (IDA), so the effects of SMA on seismic performance of the buildings would be investigated through seismic concepts. Based on the results, utilizing SMA connections in smart buildings not only could keep interstory drift control performance almost similar to conventional buildings but also could substantially reduce economic loss with significant control of unwanted residual deformations in structural fuses due to their unique ability of induced recentering behavior in structural performance. The results probabilistically determine the seismic performance acceptability of studied smart buildings based on the impact of key structural response parameters (i.e., maximum interstory drift, residual interstory drift, and energy dissipation) on the seismic performance of the structure.