Case Study
114. Tempering Tremors: San Bernardino Courthouse
Application of Taylor Devices dampers in a steel frame structure building.
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Application of Taylor Devices dampers in a steel frame structure building.
This paper provides a case study of a five story commercial building, where supplemental fluid viscous dampers are combined with a steel moment frame structure to provide a dual seismic resisting system. The paper outlines the analysis and design procedure.
Two adjacent wings of a three story office building in Southern California were found by analysis to be excessively responsive in torsion under an earthquake on the near-by Newport-Inglewood fault, some five miles from the site. The generous 4.5″ seismic separation between the two office building segments was found to be inadequate to prevent heavy pounding even in a moderate event, having a high probability of occurrence at this location. A variety of structural retrofit schemes were evaluated to mitigate the excessive torsional responses of the two building segments. These included converting the perimeter gravity frames to moment resisting frames, adding diagonal bracing to the perimeter frames, tying the two structures together at each floor level, and using viscous dampers as attachments between the buildings. The best solution from a cost, schedule, construction disruption, and earthquake performance standpoint, turned out to be joining the two building segments with horizontally oriented viscous dampers at a single floor level. This paper describes the analysis and retrofit solution that was used, and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the retrofit options studied.
Prior to the 1994 Northridge earthquake, modern welded moment resisting steel frame structures were regarded as highly resistant to earthquake induced damage and few engineers regarded earthquake induced collapse of such structures as credible. This paradigm changed following the 1994 Northridge, California and 1995 Kobe, Japan earthquakes, creating a new class of potentially hazardous structures. In response to this new information, the Federal Emergency Management Agency retained a consortium of the Structural Engineers Association of California, the Applied Technology Council and the California Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering, known as the SAC Joint Venture, to research the cause of the unexpected poor performance of these buildings and develop recommended design criteria. The resulting FEAM-351 publication provides performance based design criteria for the evaluation and upgrade of these structures. This paper presents the application of the FEMA-351 criteria to the design of structural upgrades employing energy dissipation technology to an existing 10-story steel structure. The East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD) administration building is nine stories tall, with three below grade basement levels and a rooftop, mechanical penthouse. It was completed in 1991, employing the standard vulnerable moment connections. Alternative upgrade strategies were investigated, including modification of individual connections and application of energy dissipation criteria. The latter approach, using viscous dampers, was selected.
This paper describes an experimental evaluation of viscous dampers used to reduce seismic motion in reinforced concrete moment-resisting building structures. Common practice in Taiwan is to use lightly reinforced concrete exterior walls and interior partition walls, which not considered for their contribution of stiffness and strength in the design process. As these additional walls greatly reduce relative story displacement and velocity, it has been suspected that the effectiveness of supplemental dampers would be very limited. However, the test results show that a new displacement multiplying mechanism, the toggle brace damper system, is effective even with a small relative story drift in the seismic response control of the structure. Dampers produce significant force and displacement reduction in the moment-frame structures that were investigated.
A new structural concept is proposed for the seismic design of tall buildings. This system combines the inherent stiffness and strength of a conventional truss system with the energy absorption characteristic of supplemental damping elements. The damping elements are strategically placed to form the linking elements of a coupled vertical truss system. While the force resistance system of the truss wall is in parallel, the damped link beam is in series with the component of the truss stiffness contributed to the coupled wall action. A series of time history dynamic studies gauged the performance of the proposed concept and found the proposed damped link concept superior in performance compared to the conventional approach.
A 1985 steel moment frame was seismically upgraded using passive energy dissipation, without adding stiffness to the system. The design and analysis techniques for sizing the Velocity Braces and their impact on the demand capacity ratios are reviewed in this paper. The original structure was built in the San Francisco Bay Area in compliance with the 1985 Uniform Building Code (UBC). The moment frame contains the classic pre-Northridge nonductile moment connection. Nonlinear time history analysis was used to design a damper system that provides a significant decrease in seismic response.
Realistic simulations of earthquake responses were conducted in March 2009 for a full-scale 5-story building specimens with dampers using the E-Defense, the world’s largest three-dimensional shake table. The building was tested repeatedly, inserting and replacing each of 4 damper types, steel damper, oil damper, viscous damper and viscoelastic damper. This paper discusses the test method and test results as well as details of the 5-story building specimen. Performance improvement by the dampers is addressed for moderately tall buildings that constitute a major portion of the building stock.
This paper presents the nonlinear seismic analysis, development, and implementation of an innovative seismic retrofit strategy for a six story nonductile reinforced concrete 145,000 square foot historic building. Dynamic and nonlinear static analytical results verified that the building had a weak soft story with inadequate post yield capacity and large torsional response. Hotel Stockton, in Stockton, CA, is also torsionally irregular. The analysis indicated that the existing building was not seismically adequate to withstand anticipated lateral forces generated by earthquake excitations at the site. A “collapse prevention” performance upgrade for a 475-year return event was developed. Nonlinear fluid viscous dampers were placed at the first story level to reduce the seismic demand and obtain a more uniform response. Viscoelastic fluid viscous dampers were strategically placed at one side of the building to reduce the torsional irregularity of the building. This cost effective retrofit significantly improved the seismic performance of the building.