On the Dimensioning of Viscous Dampers and their Location along the Height in Moment-Resisting Frames Structures

The effectiveness of viscous dampers in mitigating the seismic excitation impacts upon building structures has been widely proved. Recently, the authors developed a simple and direct five-step procedure for the dimensioning of viscous dampers capable of providing the frame structure with a prescribed value of the fundamental damping ratio. The procedure has been developed assuming a shear-type building schematization and a uniform distribution of lateral stiffness and floor mass along the height. In this paper the procedure is first extended to the more general case of moment resisting frame, without removing the assumption of uniform lateral stiffness and floor mass. Then, the influence of the lateral stiffness distribution and dampers distribution along the height of the structure is investigated.