Abstract
A viscoelastic (VE) damper is an effective device for dissipating vibrations in buildings, with a broad range of applications that can effectively mitigate vibrations caused by earthquakes and strong winds. When VE materials are subjected to shear vibrations, their properties change complexly due to their frequency-, temperature-, and strain-level-sensitivities, and primarily in the thickness direction. Many one-dimensional (1D) analytical methods have been extensively studied to understand property changes in this direction, particularly for different conditions such as random loads, long-duration loadings, and multilayer configurations of VE materials. However, these methods involve very detailed and complex calculations that lead to great computation times. Pursuant to these, this study proposes a simplified 1D analytical method with high computational efficiency. This method considers the 1D modeling of each layer in multi-layer dampers and employs a constitutive model that can reproduce the temperature-, frequency- and strain-level- sensitivities of VE materials to calculate the properties of VE dampers. However, this method has not yet been applied to simulate the response of VE dampers under wind-induced vibrations. Thus, this study uses this method to simulate a wind-induced vibration experiment on a six-layer VE damper. The analytical results show a good agreement with the experimental results.
