Recentring and control of peak displacements of a RC frame using damping devices

Recentring capacity is significant for mitigating the repair costs of structures subjected to seismic actions because these costs result from both maximum and residual displacements. A reinforced concrete frame coupled with a variety of energy dissipation devices, namely viscous dampers, steel hysteretic dampers, and passive and semi-active shape memory alloy based devices, was numerically assessed. The nonlinear behaviour, including reinforcing bars bond-slip in beam-column joints, was considered. The passive solution with shape memory alloys and the steel hysteretic dissipators considered were not capable of satisfactorily reducing displacements. Furthermore, the semi-active devices delivered a similar control of the peak displacements to the linear viscous dampers and were capable of recentring the structure, unlike the viscous and the steel hysteretic dampers.