A simple approach to the seismic design of friction damped braced medium-rise frames

This paper is concerned with the seismic design of steel frames using friction damped slotted bolted connections (SBCs) in the diagonal braces as a means for passive control. A dynamic model that uses bilinear hysteretic behavior for the damper describes the response of a single degree of freedom (SDOF) steel frame and constitutes the basis for the design. A design procedure that attains the stiffness of the individual braces and their elongation at the threshold of activation is then applied to 10-story and 3-story steel frames. This design procedure is a two-phase iterative scheme of the analysis/redesign type, the analysis of which is modal. Finally, a full nonlinear dynamic analysis that uses a generalized version for MDOFʹs of the bilinear hysteretic SDOF model assesses the design.