Mechanical Properties of Improved Multiple-Layers Viscoelastic Damper

Viscoelastic dampers (VEDs) have been implemented successfully to reduce structural vibrations due to earthquakes and wind events. Conventional VEDs consist of two viscoelastic (VE) layers chemically bounded at their entire contact surface to three steel plates. This configuration has proven to be efficient in controlling the structure vibration. It has also been reported that VEDs can dissipate energy at any level of vibration, producing damping forces. However, when very large damping forces are required, the shear area of the VE layers and the steel plates should be increased to reach the target damping force since the energy is dissipated by hysteretic shear deformation developed in the VE material. Two main issues are associated with this large area. First, the steel plates are more susceptible to experiencing buckling due to out-of-plane deformations. Second, the overall size of the damper becomes larger which is not desirable from the architectural perspective and sometimes from the space usage perspective. As a solution, this study proposes an innovative VED so-called multiple-layers viscoelastic damper (MLVED) able to produce larger damping forces. The proposed MLVED consists of four VE layers bounded between five steel plates. The dynamic mechanical properties of MLVED are initially investigated through a full-scale test. With the test results, the finite element model is developed and calibrated using the commercial software ABAQUS. At a later stage, the calibrated model was used to investigate numerically the mechanical performance of MLVED if different VE layers areas and thicknesses are considered. Results indicated that the proposed MLVED possesses good energy dissipation capacity and its mechanical properties are strongly influenced by strain amplitude rather than loading frequency. Numerical results also showed that the damper is effective in dissipating energy even if different VE layers areas and thicknesses are considered. However, an optimal combination between the area and thickness of the VE layers needs to be found to maximize the damper performance.