An innovative approach to model dissipation mechanism in coupled shear walls

The dynamic response of tall buildings plays a significant role in determining both design wind loading and seismic behavior. The degree of energy dissipation, or damping, that a building can provide directly affects the resonant response and thus the effective design loading. In this paper, Replacement Beam Method as a Sandwich beam is presented for coupled shear walls and a one-dimensional finite element method (FEM) has been adopted for lateral analyses of building systems. In this method in addition to structural elements stiffnesses, the damping mechanism has been defined as Distributed Internal Viscous Damping (DIVD) model along shear walls and connecting beams, while acting as bending and shearing mechanisms. Then, an equivalent continuum model of coupled walls, the so called Generalized Sandwich Beam (GSB), has been provided capturing both elastic and dissipative performance by adopting strain and dissipation energy balance of the set of connecting beams, respectively. By means of such GSB model, a non-uniformly distributed damping model has been also modeled simulating dissipation at higher elevations of coupled walls as an equivalent damping effect of additional dissipative devices. A reference example has been analyzed numerically to investigate the performance of proposed damping models in basic dynamic characteristics of coupled shear walls such as damped eigenproblems, damping ratio, and near-resonance transversally response. The results have shown the proper efficiency of such damping models in addition to simple application in analysis and primary design of tall building coupled shear wall systems.