Abstract
A hysteretic damper must be ductile enough to consume the energy of repeated earth quakes and to mitigate damage on columns and beams. This paper describes a simple method to evaluate the cumulative ductility response factor and presents a statistics of the response factor using numerical examples. The failure probability of a hysteretic damper is also presented taking the deterioration of the damper due to repeated loading into account. The reliability of a hysteretic damper depends on the structural characteristics and the capacity of the damper and the replacement of the damper may have to be considered depending on the combination.
