SEISMIC RESPONSE OF UNSYMMETRIC BUILDING WITH OPTIMALLY PLACED FRICTION DAMPERS

Conventional methods of seismic rehabilitation with concrete shear walls or steel bracing are not considered suitable for some buildings as upgrades with these methods would have required expensive and time consuming foundation work. Supplemental damping in conjunction with appropriate stiffness offers an innovative and attractive solution for the seismic rehabilitation of such structures. This paper deals with the use of friction damper as a passive dissipative device in order to seismic retrofit of existing structures and discusses the optimal placement criteria. To fulfill this objective, six storey and ten storey L-shaped buildings have been modeled with five different damper location formats in SAP2000 subjected to El Centro and Utterkashi earthquake records. Non-Linear Modal Time History Method has been used for the analysis and base shear, joint displacement, member forces and hysteresis energy has been compared to find out most optimal damper location format.