Numerical simulation of the seismic behavior of building structures equipped with friction energy dissipators

This paper presents a new algorithm to simulate theseismic responseofN-story building frames incorporating friction energydissipators; a device per floor is considered. The frames with the dissipators are described by 2Dlumped masses modelswith twodegrees of freedomper floor, namely the horizontal displacements of the main structure and of the dissipators. The proposed algorithm consists of a modification of thelinear accelerationmethod; the main innovation consists of checking at each calculation instant the sliding or sticking condition at each floor, hence, the number of “active” degrees of freedom changes continuously, ranging in betweenN(there is sticking condition at every dissipator) and 2N(there is sliding condition at every dissipator). Some results given by this algorithm are compared to experimental results fromad-hoc testingand to numerical results obtained with the ADINA software package. In both cases, agreement is satisfactory while the proposed method is more computationally efficient.