Preliminary study on a composite steel slit damper

A steel slit damper has been used to enhance the seismic performance of structures with several advantages. The damper can be easily manufactured at a low cost. Furthermore, it can dissipate a significant amount of seismic energy through the stable hysteretic behavior of steel. This study presents a preliminary investigation of the development of a composite steel slit damper that can respond effectively at multiple levels of seismic loading. The performance of the prototype composite steel slit damper is investigated in both experimental and analytical ways. In the experiments, the specimen shows the stable hysteretic response with sufficient ductility, where the multi-phased response is observed in the incremental-amplitude cyclic loading case. Furthermore, a nonlinear numerical analysis that combines both kinematic hardening and isotropic hardening models can reliably describe such characteristics.