Evaluation of wall damper effectiveness on the seismic performance of buildings

Energy dissipation systems, e.g. viscous linear and wall dampers, are effective solutions for enhancing the seismic performance of buildings through reducing the dynamic and seismic demands. These systems are particularly beneficial for high-rise buildings for controlling accelerations and motion comfort under wind loading as well. For high-rise buildings, dynamic behavior is the primary issue in the design process. As a result of developing technology, many new energy dissipation systems have been developed and used for four decades. In this paper, the effects of wall dampers on the dynamic performance of the high-rise buildings under seismic loads are evaluated. Wall dampers have been used in many projects mainly in Japan, and recently, a new hospital building in California in the United States has been equipped with wall dampers for seismic mitigation. A readily available computational model for wall dampers is implemented and used in this study to analytically investigate the seismic response of high-rise buildings with and without wall dampers. A 30-story reinforced concrete buildings that is located in Turkey and use core shear walls as lateral resistance systems is considered with and without wall dampers for this study. For a target interstory drift of 1.5% as in case of special or important buildings, the analysis here considered maximum credible earthquake level to check whether wall dampers can satisfy the target drift requirements. Nonlinear response history analysis was carried out for the two cases: with and without wall dampers, and the wall dampers were shown to effectively reduce maximum interstory drift ratios from more than 2% to less than the 1.5% target performance objective.