Vibration Control of Structures Utilizing Architectural Walls

A study of architectural walls for energy dissipation and vibration control of buildings in seismic zones is presented. Typical architectural walls exhibit inelastic behavior; however, both the stiiness and energy dissipation capacity degrade after the walls are damaged. Integrating passive damping devices within these walls augments their energy dissipative abilities by widening the hysteresis loops and increasing the number of cycles to failure. The paper proposes a method of vibration control that would utilize architectural walls as hysteretic energy dissipators. Introduction In the majority of earthquake engineering analyses, architectural walls, which are considered non-structural components, are not modeled explicitly. These walls, however, may contribute signiicantly to the overall structural stiiness and can be a major source of energy dissipation during seismic events. A prior study by the authors (Smith et al., 1996) involved quantiication of the eeects of architectural walls on structural behavior and resulted in the development of an analytical model which represents the stiiness and energy dissipative characteristics of typical steel stud architectural walls (Vance et al., 1996). The objective of this research project is to investigate the potential of utilizing architectural walls as vibration control devices by integrating them with passive control mechanisms, such as viscoelastic and friction-slip dampers. Conventional building design in earthquake engineering relies on the inelastic behavior of structural members to dissipate the input energy from lateral loads. While large amounts of energy may be dissipated through inelastic behavior, damage to structural members is not desirable. Thus, by incorporating another means