Shake-table testing of two adjacent similar building frames connected with optimal viscoelastic dampers

The seismic safety of adjacent buildings has attracted researchers' interest over the past two decades. The effective technique is to connect dissimilar buildings with dampers, instead of individual buildings’ seismic protection. Application of this technique to similar buildings is challenging and damper connection at all floor levels is economically not viable. As a result, the current study focuses on the optimal configuration of visco-elastic dampers for reducing the response of dynamically similar adjacent buildings when subjected to seismic forces. Initially, two ten-story steel frame models are built to mimic the behaviour of similar building frames. Free vibration experiments are carried out and numerically validated. After that, forced vibration experiments are performed with and without dampers using the unidirectional shake table excited by scaled ground motions; numerical model validation is also performed with the obtained vibration time history response. According to this study, it is observed that the peak displacement reduction of 26% to 36% is observed by providing dampers at their optimal locations the proposed damper connections to similar building frames performs effectively to reduce seismic response compared to the building frames without dampers. Moreover, the proposed technique evaluated through experimental study and correlated through numerical study shows the effectiveness of a damper coupled control technique for real-time applications.