COMPARING BLAST LOAD BEHAVIORS OF REHABILITATED CONCRETE STRUCTURES USING VISCOUS DAMPER AND BASE ISOLATOR

The buildings structures around the world suffer from terrorist attacks and bombings. This justifies the need to study the effect of blast loading on structures and the methods to prevent collapse of structures in order to save human lives and minimize financial losses. In this study, effects of the passive viscous dampers and base isolators on structures which are subjected to blast loading are separately investigated. Blast load is applied on the structures with a pressure wave. This pressure wave has many uncertainties specified in different codes. For the sake of simplicity, this pressure wave is applied on different faces of the structure. Herein, only loading on the fa\c{c}ade or the structure is considered and the loading on the other faces of the structure are neglected as the structure doesn't have any severe irregularities. In the 1st case, viscous dampers are added to the structure adding damping of the structure between 5 to 25\% and the effect of this added damping is studied through the paper. For the 2nd case, base isolators are designed according to UBC-1997 code. Numerical simulations are carried out in the SAP environment using nonlinear time-history analysis. Moreover, they are studied with different stiffness coefficients and the uncertainties in yielding force of these tools have been considered in numerical simulations. These passive control devices are mainly designed such that they can perform well under earthquake loads. Viscous dampers conform to the first mode of vibration of the structure and base isolators are designed according to seismic codes. Numerical simulations show that base shear in the optimum specifications of viscous dampers and base isolators compared to bare frame showed 60\% increase and 50\% decrease, respectively. However, drifts are minimized to 1.7\% for added damping values of 25\%. This value is hard to reach with base isolators as the values of drifts in this case have a minimum value of 2\%.