Configuration and scale effect on cyclic performance of integrated plate dampers

The present study is focused on the experimental investigation of integrated metallic plate damper (IMPD) yielding under combined flexure and shear. Two configurations of the IMPDs with ADAS plates (AP) and K-butterfly plates (BP) as flexure components in two different scales are developed and tested under reverse cyclic loading. The square shear plate (SP) is utilized as a shear component in both configurations. In contrast, the number of flexure components varies from two to four in the AP-integrated damper and from four to eight in the BP-integrated damper. The height of the small and large-scale dampers is fixed at 140 mm and 273 mm, respectively, and other dimensions vary in accordance with their respective heights. The effect of damper size and configurations on overall performance in terms of hysteretic behavior, strength, stiffness, and energy dissipation potential is studied. The result demonstrated that IMPDs integrated with AP are more efficient than BP in terms of average enhancement of strength and energy dissipation by 23 % and 41 %, respectively. The increased size has an immense impact on the energy dissipation potential of the IMPDs, which is 1.77 to 2.8 times more than that of the smaller IMPDs. Additionally, the scale effect is found to be more prominent in AP-integrated IMPDs. The Digital Image Correlation (DIC) technique has proved helpful in finding the strain pattern in the plates, and the results are close to the preinstalled locations of the strain gauges.