A displacement-based procedure for seismic design of structures controlled by new metallic-yielding pistonic damper

Abstract

The recently developed metallic-yielding pistonic (MYP) damper is a novel passive control system. It consists of a set of rectangular yielding plates under pure-bending loading conditions. The developed device generally performs as a tension/compression element with rigidity and stability in other directions. In this study, a step-by-step procedure is presented for the design of the structures controlled by this damper under severe earthquakes. The main design objective of this procedure is the perfect seismic protection of the combined control-structure based on the fulfillment of two criteria including fuse-like performance and control sustainability. The first criterion preserves the elastic behavior of the controlled structure (which is defined as the perfect structural protection) under severe earthquakes and the other one is required to be met for the stability of the control system. The study is followed by examination of the procedure through seismic analyses of four 5–20 story moment-resisting buildings as examples of its application. From the obtained results, it was observed that the developed procedure is able to meet all design control objectives for multi-story buildings with acceptable accuracy without requiring any complicated numerical control-structure modeling and nonlinear dynamic analyses. Moreover, the controlled structures experience seismic responses significantly decreased by 67–56 %, 60–46 % and 79–70 % respectively for the maximum lateral drift, shear force and residual drift in average for the stories from the shortest to the tallest structure. © 2025 Elsevier Ltd