Seismic response of short and medium period steel braced frames with dissipative devices

A parametric analysis of the seismic response of braced frames equipped with hysteretic dissipative devices is carried out by using a simplified nonlinear SDOF system subjected to a statistically meaningful number of artificially generated stationary accelerograms, which prove to be compatible with a target spectrum. Response spectra, derived in terms of energy and displacement, show that the seismic behavior of short period braced frames is very different from that of medium period structures, and this circumstance is clearly explained by means of a frequency domain analysis of their dynamic response. This study also shows that the actual seismic behavior of both types of systems considered can be very well approximated by using a suitable equivalent linear SDOF system, whose effectiveness is tested by calibration of the characterizing parameters for some sample classes.