Abstract
Viscoelastic dampers (VE dampers) have been used in the earthquake-resistant and wind-resistant design of tall buildings for about 30 years, because they have strong damping effect against from small to large vibration. After Northridge earthquake in US A 1994 and Hyogoken-Nanbu earthquake in Japan 1995, viscoelastic dampers, as a part of passive energy dissipation system, are getting more attention in the seismic design of building structures. However, the mechanical characteristics of viscoelastic material are very sensitive to the temperature of VE material and frequency of structural system, the mathematical formulation of hysteretic model is too complex and difficult to be used directly in the actual dynamic response analysis. This paper presents the determination method of elastic stiffness k and damping coefficient c for the simple Kelvin-Voigt model based on the results of dynamic loading test of VE dampers. In order to use the Kelvin-Voigt model and the empirical formula of elastic stiffness k and damping coefficient c directly into the time history response analysis, a new concept of transient frequency is proposed in this paper. It is confirmed that, the proposed simple model has good agreement with the results of random dynamic loading tests.
