Comparative Analysis of Seismic Isolators With Different Steel Dampers

The dissipation energy capacity of traditional isolation systems is limited. However, some types of steel dampers, for instances, X-shaped steel dampers, J-shaped steel dampers and U-shaped steel dampers, have the advantage of a high dissipative energy capacity. In this paper, a seismic isolator and S-shaped steel dampers are connected together to form a novel hybrid seismic isolation system, and S-shaped steel dampers are bolted together to create double U-shaped steel dampers. The novel device is modeled in ABAQUS to investigate the mechanical properties of the hybrid system. Some comparisons of different steel dampers, for example, U steel damper (USD), S steel damper (SSD) and S-shaped steel damper (SSSD) are provided. It is investigated mechanical performance of steel dampers in the same conditions, such as material properties and geometric properties. The effective horizontal stiffness of SSSDs is bigger than that of UCDs and SSDs, reducing the structural displacement effectively. The damping ratio of SSSDs and SSDs is close and larger than that of USDs. The hysteretic curve of SSSDs is much larger and a better performance than the other two steel dampers is obtained. Moreover, the seismic isolation systems by adding different steel dampers have the differences of mechanical properties, especially in effective horizontal stiffness, structural period and damping ratio. Different from UCDs and SSDs. The application of SSSDs in the seismic isolation system has bigger effective horizontal stiffness and damping ratio. Therefore, seismic isolator using SSSDs has better performance with the comparison of other systems, which can be adopted as a reference in practice.