Second International Conference on Vulnerability and Risk Analysis and Management (ICVRAM2014)

13 - 16 July 2014, University of Liverpool, UK

Michael Beer, Ivan S.K. Au & Jim W. Hall (editors)

RELIABILITY-BASED DESIGN OF FLUID VISCOUS

DAMPER FOR SEISMIC PROTECTION OF BUILDING
FRAMES
ENRICO TUBALDI 1, ANDREA DALL'ASTA2, MATTEO BROGGI3, EDOARDO
PATELLI3, MARCO DE ANGELIS3
1

Department of Civil Engineering, Construction and Architecture (DICEA)

Polytechnic University of Marche
Via Brecce Bianche, 60131 Ancona (AN), Italy
E-mail: etubaldi@gmail.com
2
School of Architecture and Design, University of Camerino, Viale della Rimembranza,
63100 Ascoli Piceno (AP), Italy
E-mail: a.asta@tin.it
3
Institute for Risk and Uncertainty, University of Liverpool, Brownlow Hill, UK.
E-mail: Matteo.Broggi@liverpool.ac.uk, edoardo.patelli@liverpool.ac.uk, Marco.DeAngelis@liverpool.ac.uk

Viscous dampers are energy dissipation devices widely employed to control the structural
response of mechanical and civil systems subjected to dynamic loadings. In particular, such
dampers have been extensively applied in earthquake engineering to enhance the seismic
performance of new and existing building frames.
Although simplified methodologies for the preliminary design of the optimal damper properties
are well established, they are often based on deterministic or semi-probabilistic approaches
neglecting the response dispersion due to the uncertainties inherent to the seismic input and the
system model.
In this study, a probabilistic methodology is proposed for the reliability-based design of viscous
dampers for the seismic protection of structural systems. The methodology permits to evaluate
the optimal (in terms of cost) damper properties (viscous constant, cd, and damper exponent, )
such that the probability of failure of the structural system to which they are added does not
exceed a target value. This approach explicitly accounts for the dispersion of the response due to
the ground motion variability in evaluating the optimal damper properties. By this way, also the
effects of the damper nonlinearity on the probabilistic response characteristics are considered.
The proposed methodology is applied to the retrofit of an industrial building (Figure 1).
9.15m

9.15m

9.15m

9.15m

Beam yield strength:

248 MPa
Column yield strength:
345 MPa

3.96m

W24x68

W24x68

W24x68

W21x44

3.96m

W30x116

W30x116

W30x116

W21x44

3.96m

W33x118

W33x118

W33x118

W21x44

Seismic mass:
floors 1,2 = 975 tons
floor 3 = 1040 tons
viscous dampers

Figure 1. Building model description and properties.

Michael Beer, Ivan S.K. Au & Jim W. Hall (editors)

The dampers are designed by considering a limit state corresponding to the onset of inelastic
deformations. The structural model is assumed to be deterministic. Thus, the only uncertainties
are inherent to the seismic input, which is modeled as a non-stationary stochastic process. The
inverse reliability problem corresponding to the dampers' design is solved by employing Latin
Hypercube sampling for the reliability analysis and Cobyla for the optimization. The opensource general purpose numerical framework OpenCossan is employed to perform the
optimization.
The optimal solution (in terms of dampers cost ) obtained at the end of the reliability-based
optimization process corresponds to nonlinear viscous dampers with the lowest velocity
exponent among those admissible (Figure 2). The comparison between the optimal nonlinear
solution ( = 0.3) and the solution corresponding to the use of linear dampers ( = 1) reveals
that the probabilistic response properties of the retrofitted system are significantly affected by
the damper nonlinearity.
a)

x 10000

b)

(cd)[kNs/m]

0.6

x 1000

3.6
3.2

0.4

2.8

cd [kNs/m]

0.8

0.2

2.4

0
0.3

0.4

0.5

0.6

0.7

0.8

0.9

2
0.3

0.4

0.5

0.6

0.7

0.8

0.9

[-]

[-]

Figure 2. Optimal values of cd* (a) and of objective function (b) vs. damper exponent .
Keywords: Viscous dampers, performance based earthquake engineering, reliability-based design.
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1.
2.
3.

4.

5.

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