Strategic width-wise arrangement of viscous dampers in steel buildings under strong earthquakes

Supplemental passive dampers are widely employed to improve the structural performance of buildings under seismic excitations. Nevertheless, the added damping could be counter-productive if the axial forces induced by the damper reaction forces are not routed properly in the columns. A few researchers engaged to optimize the width-wise damper arrangement to improve the delivered path of the axial column forces. However, most of these studies are limited under the design-based seismic level and few of them has evaluated the collapse performance of buildings under strong earthquakes. In this paper, the strategic width-wise placement method of viscous dampers is explored regarding the building performance under collapse state. Two realistic steel buildings with different storeys are modelled and compared to explore higher mode effects. Each building is designed with four different damper arrangement scenarios based on a classic damper distribution method. Both a far-fault and a near-fault seismic environment are considered for the buildings. Incremental Dynamic Analysis (IDA) is performed to evaluate the probability of collapse and the plastic mechanism of the retrofitted steel buildings.