RESEARCH ARTICLE


Solutions for the Design and Increasing of Efficiency of Viscous Dampers



G. Alotta, L. Cavaleri*, M. Di Paola, M.F. Ferrotto
Dipartimento di Ingegneria Civile, Ambientale, Aerospaziale, dei Materiali (DICAM), University of Palermo, Viale del-le Scienze - 90128 Palermo, Italy


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Creative Commons License
© Alotta et al.; Licensee Bentham Open.

open-access license: This is an open access article licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 International Public License (CC BY-NC 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode), which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited.

& Address correspondence to this author at the Dipartimento di Ingegneria Civile, Ambientale, Aerospaziale, dei Materiali (DICAM), University of Palermo, Viale delle Scienze - 90128 Palermo, Italy; Tel: +39 091 23896733; Fax: +39 091 6657749; E-mail: liborio.cavaleri@unipa.it


Abstract

In last decades many strategies for seismic vulnerability mitigation of structures have been studied and experimented; in particular energy dissipation by external devices assumes a great importance for the relative simplicity and efficacy. Among all possible approaches the use of fluid viscous dampers are very interesting, because of their velocity-dependent behaviour and relatively low costs. Application on buildings requires a specific study under seismic excitation and a particular attention on structural details. Nevertheless seismic codes give only general information and in most case the design of a such protection systems results difficult; this problem is relevant also in Italy where last seismic code (NTC 2008) on one hand has increased the performance level to be attributed to buildings, especially public and strategic, on the other hand does not give a guide for the design of external dissipation devices as fluid viscous dampers or others. In this study, after a general description of fluid viscous dampers and the criteria of applying on buildings, a simplified procedure for the design of these devices is discussed also by means an application.

Keywords: Design, ground motions, seismic protection, time history, viscous dampers.