A Novel Self-Recovery Tri-stable Damper: Design and Analysis of the Energy Dissipation Performance

Mechanical metamaterials with the natural material engineered can give them properties and functions, which are not available in any existing materials. Recently, the mechanical metamaterials have already become a cutting-edge research topic and are widely used in many fields such as electronics, biology, medicine etc. In this paper, we introduced the concept of the mechanical metamaterials to the damper design for seismic resistance in civil engineering. A novel self-recovery tri-stable metal damper (SRTMD) was proposed, which takes fully advantage of the elastic deformation to realize the ability of self-recovery. Tri-stablility consists of two bistable elements (BE). The detailed design of BE and SRTMD was described in the paper. The mechanism was illustrated theoretically. Further, the energy dissipation performance of SRTMD was evaluated numerically. The results show that the proposed damper has an excellent capability in energy dissipation and post-earthquake restorability.