IMPROVEMENT OF THE SEISMIC BEHAVIOUR OF PRECAST CONCRETE STRUCTURES BY MEANS OF ENERGY DISSIPATING DEVICES

P. MATA; A. BARBAT; S. OLLER

Conferencia; Third European Conference on Structural Control (3ECSC).; 2004

The effectiveness of passive control techniques is well recognized for reducing the dynamicresponse of civil structures exposed to seismic actions. Using energy dissipation devices toabsorb a part of the input energy induced by de earthquake in building and to concentrate the damage in localized members, it is possible to improve the seismic behavior of this type of structures.This develops a procedure for the numerical simulation of the dynamic response of a typicalprecast concrete industrial building under earthquake loads, using passive energy dissipatingdevices. Only hysteretic dissipaters are considered in this study. Nonlinear behavior for bothstructure and dissipating devices are considered in the computational simulations. Fordescribing the mechanical behavior of concrete a local damage constitutive model based onKachanov?s theory is used. Reinforcing steel bars and stirrups are treated using the plasticitymodel and mixing theory. For the dissipating devices a new element was developed which takes into account its nonlinear characteristics. Additionally, the viscous effects of the structure are considered in a rigorous manner, at the constitutive level of the materials. The constitutive models are implemented within a finite elements frame and applied to the case of Timoshenko beam elements. The computer code used in the nonlinear analysis allows to develop a step-bystep numerical integration of the equilibrium equations, and therefore it is possible to know the time history of all relevant dynamical variables for the structure.