Optimal Seismic Design of Stiffness and Gap of Hysteretic-Viscous Hybrid Damper System in Nonlinear Building Frames for Simultaneous Reduction of Interstory Drift and Acceleration

The viscous-hysteretic hybrid (HVH) damper system recently introduced by one of the authors has a clear property that, when the hysteretic dampers with gap mechanism become active (stiffness element starts working), the acceleration of building frames with this damper system as a stopper attains large values in spite of the advantageous feature to prevent excessive deformation. It is therefore desired that both the maximum interstory drift and the maximum acceleration exhibit an acceptable value with appropriate compromise. The double impulse as a simplified version of one-cycle sine wave as a representative of the main part of near-fault ground motions can simulate the maximum interstory drifts properly. However, it cannot simulate the maximum accelerations due to its impulsive nature. In this case, the sine wave corresponding to the double impulse can play an important role in the reliable simulation of the maximum accelerations. Even in such circumstance, the analysis using the double impulse is important because it enables to obtain the critical timing of the input, i.e. the nonlinear resonant frequency of the sine wave without repetition. The investigations on the criticality of the sine wave corresponding to the critical double impulse show that the critical timing of the double impulse leads to the nonlinear resonant frequency of the sine wave in view of the maximum interstory drift, the maximum top acceleration and the maximum relative acceleration for the constant input acceleration and the constant input velocity except for some cases. It is demonstrated finally that the index in terms of the maximum interstory drift and the maximum acceleration can be introduced as an appropriate parameter for deriving the optimally compromised gap quantity of hysteretic dampers with gap mechanism for various input velocity levels and various hysteretic damper stiffness ratios.