SUSTAINABILITY IN SOFT WEAK OPEN FRONT BUILDINGS

Soft weak open front (SWOF) buildings often perform poorly in earthquakes. Two examples are buildings with a street facing garage, or commercial facilities with extensive open display windows. The poor performance of SWOF structures can consist of complete loss of use or even total collapse. This paper presents an approach to protecting such structures via the addition of an energy dissipation system (viscous dampers) such that peak inter-story drifts are limited to about 1% under relatively severe seismic events, thus keeping the deformations within the elastic range. With this addition of damping, earthquake survivability of this class of structures increases significantly. A series of seismic analyses are presented herein to demonstrate the potential performance of the damping system. In addition, a variety of damper installation configurations that provide enhanced energy dissipation are discussed.