Investigation on the reasonable area of energy-dissipation bars for hybrid rocking columns

In recent years, hybrid rocking columns have drawn more and more interests from researchers, due to their self-centering capacity. The energy-dissipation bars, which are generally applied at the rocking joints of hybrid rocking columns, could improve their energy dissipation capacities. Thus, the reasonable reinforcement ratio of energy-dissipation bars is much required for engineering applications. To determine the reasonable reinforcement ratio of energy-dissipation bars, a numerical investigation is conducted in this paper based on nonlinear time-history analysis. The analysis results show that a reasonable reinforcement ratio of energy-dissipation bars can effectively reduce seismic displacements of the hybrid rocking columns, without excessive residual deformations. Further, the reasonable reinforcement ratio of energy-dissipation bars for hybrid rocking columns with different periods is proposed in this paper.