RESEARCH ARTICLE
Comparative Analysis of the Energy Dissipation of Steel Buildings with Concentric and Eccentric Braces
Edelis del V. Marquez A.*, William Lobo-Q1, Juan C. Vielma*, 2
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2015Volume: 9
First Page: 295
Last Page: 307
Publisher ID: TOCIEJ-9-295
DOI: 10.2174/1874149501509010295
Article History:
Received Date: 11/10/2014Revision Received Date: 24/11/2014
Acceptance Date: 9/12/2014
Electronic publication date: 28/5/2015
Collection year: 2015
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
A comparative study has been done to analyze the behavior of regular steel building structures of 4, 6, 8 and 10 stories, located in seismic zone 5 and soil type S1. The structures were upgraded with different brace configurations according to current Venezuelan codes. A total number of 24 numerical models were analyzed considering non-linear static and incremental dynamic analysis (IDA). The buildings were initially designed as moment resisting frames, and upgraded with six different bracing configurations: concentric braces in “X” and inverted “V”; eccentric braces inverted "V" with horizontal links, inverted “Y” and “X” with vertical links. Short length links were used to ensure a shear failure.
The used methodology is based on obtaining the capacity, IDA curves, and bilinear approximations of these curves that allow the determination of yield and ultimate capacity points, in order to estimate important parameters of seismic response: overstrength and ductility; and considering these areas under the curves to estimate elastic deformation energy, energy dissipated by hysteretic damping and equivalent damping.
According to the results, the cases with no brace enhancement showed the lowest lateral strength and lateral stiffness and high deformation capacity. On the other hand, the concentric bracing cases, resulted with the highest stiffness and strength and the lowest deformation capacity, therefore they have low ductility and energy dissipation capacity under seismic loading. Structures with links showed intermediate stiffness and strengths, resulting in the best performance in terms of ductility and energy dissipation capacity. The present study provides a better understanding of the benefits of eccentrically braced systems.
