Experimental study of Pipe-Fuse Damper for passive energy dissipation in structures

This study presents a novel passive metallic damper, Pipe-Fuse Damper (PFD), to improve the seismic response of structures with dissipation of the earthquake energy. The Fuse Damper (FD) was recently introduced by using steel bars as fuses, Bar-Fuse Damper (BFD), and its performance was evaluated experimentally. The Fuse Damper (FD) is built using common cross-sections found in engineering structures, such as square hollow sections (SHS) and U-shaped sections as well as metal sheets. As a special feature, the Fuse Damper (FD) uses replaceable components as an energy-absorber part with both flexural and tensile energy dissipating mechanisms. In this study, the Fuse Damper (FD) was evaluated with components of steel pipes experimentally and numerically. To assess the individual performance of this damper, the Pipe-Fuse Damper (PFD), a series of monotonic and cyclic experiments were conducted on real-scale specimens. The studied parameters for this replaceable element in the experiments were the number of pipes and their diameter, length, and thickness. The results indicate that, in addition to demonstrating a stable hysteretic behaviour and considerable energy dissipation within an appropriate displacement reversal, the proposed damper offers the easy replacement of pipe components after each failure. Moreover, the Pipe-Fuse Damper (PFD) showed less pinching effects on its hysteresis and a higher energy dissipation compared to the Bar-Fuse Damper (BFD) under the same conditions.