Abstract
The damper investigated is an assemblage of a couple of units composed of two parallel steel plates and a layer of epoxy visco-elastic material (VEM) between them. When subjected to shear deformation, the VEM exhibits a hysteretic property or an energy absorbing capacity. The purpose of this paper is to present a method to construct a mechanical model to exactly simulate the dynamic behaviors of this damper, paving the way to putting it to practical use in the passive vibration-control design of buildings. A series of cyclic loading tests on the damper reveals that an equivalent stiffness and an equivalent damping coefficient, representing the hysteretic properties of the damper, are mainly dependent on the loading frequency and the current temperature. A linear three-element dashpot-spring model proposed has been confirmed capable of simulating these properties exactly .
