Evaluation of the EDR Performance in Seismic Control of Steel Structures Using Endurance Time Method

The Energy Dissipating Restraint (EDR) is a friction device which can be used to dissipate the energy introduced to a structure by a seismic event. In this paper, the performance of the structures which are outfitted with the EDR is investigated in several intensity levels by using a novel seismic analysis method, namely the Endurance Time (ET) method. By reasonably estimating the response of structures over the entire range of the desired intensity levels through each time-history analysis, this method can effectively reduce the computational cost, offering an appropriate procedure for performance-based design of structures. The EDR performance in the seismic control of steel frames is evaluated at low to high intensity levels through three case studies with various story numbers. Additionally, a comparison is made between the ET results and those of conventional time-history analysis, in which a good concordance between the two methods is observed.