The seismic reliability of two connected SMRF structures

This article aims to investigate the possible retrofitting of a deficient building with soft story failure mode by connecting it to an adjacent building which is designed based on current code with friction dampers at all floors. Low cost and high performance reliability along with significant energy dissipation pertaining to stable hysteretic loops may be considered in order to choose the proper damper for connecting adjacent buildings. After connecting two neighbouring floors by friction dampers, the sliding forces of dampers at various stories are set in two arrangements: uniform sliding force and then variable sliding force. In order to account for the stochastic nature of the seismic events, incremental dynamic analyses are employed prior and after the installation of the friction dampers at the various floors. Based on these results, fragility curves and mean annual rate of exceedance of serviceability and ultimate limit states are obtained. The results of this study show that the collapse mode of the deficient building can affect the optimum arrangement of sliding forces of friction dampers at Collapse Prevention (CP) performance level. In particular, the Immediate Occupancy (IO) performance level is not tangible to the sliding force arrangement and it depends solely on sliding force value. Generally it can be claimed that this rehabilitation scheme can turn the challenge of pounding two adjacent buildings into the opportunity of dissipating a large amount of the seismic input energy by the friction dampers, thus improving significantly the poor seismic performance of the deficient structure.