This study proposes an RCS composite damping device that can achieve seismic reinforcement of existing buildings by dissipating energy by inelastic deformation. A series of experiments assessing the performances of the rubber core pad, hysteretic steel slit damping device, and hybrid RCS damping device were conducted. The results showed that the ratios of the deviations to the mean values satisfied the domestic damping-device conformity condition for the load at maximum device displacement in each direction, at the maximum force and minimum force at zero displacement, as well as the hysteresis curve area. In addition, three analysis models based on load-displacement characteristics were proposed for application to seismic reinforcement design. In addition, the validity of the three proposed models was confirmed, as they simulated the experimental results well. Meanwhile, as the shear deformation of the rubber-core pad increased, the hysteretic behavior of super-elasticity greatly increased the horizontal force of the damping device. Therefore, limiting the allowable displacement during design is deemed to be necessary.

The use of dampers is being considered a means to improve the seismic performance of buildings. It may take considerable time and effort to find an optimal design solution since repeated three-dimensional nonlinear time history analyses are required. Therefore, a preliminary design procedure for seismic retrofit using hysteretic dampers was proposed in this study. In the proposed procedure, the amount of retrofit (required number of dampers) is estimated from the capacity curve of the building before retrofit and allowable story drift of the building. In combining the capacity curves of the building and the dampers, the deformation demand for the dampers can be easily checked against their deformation capacity. The equations to transform the device displacement to roof displacement for the combination of capacity curves are developed. The proposed procedure was applied to the seismic retrofit design of sample buildings. The study found that the estimated capacity curve was very close to the actual capacity curve obtained from the pushover analysis, which can determine an appropriate configuration to meet the required seismic performance.

In this paper, various dynamic model of magnetorheological (MR) damper, is required for describing the hysteresis of MR damper and for their application are investigated to structural control. The dynamic characteristics and control effects of the modeling methods for MR dampers such as Bingham, biviscous, hysteretic biviscous, simple Bouc-Wen, Bouc-Wen with mass element, and phenomenological models are studied. Of these models, hysteretic biviscous model which is simple and describes the hysteretic characteristics, is chosen for numerical studies. The capacity of MR damper is determined as a portion of not the building weight but the lateral restoring force.