A Study of Cyclic Performance of Frames equipped with innovative Diamond-Scheme Bracing System including a Circular Yielding Damper

Various solutions have been proposed to enhance the ductility of the bracings system in recent years. Accordingly, the development of steel rings as structural fuses could be counted as one of the successful attempts which need to be further studied. In this respect, this paper addresses a novel diamond-scheme bracing system equipped with a steel ring whose function is to act as a sacrificial fuse. This system has been majorly developed to improve ductility and energy absorption of the conventional bracing system that is known as the prime shortfalls of this system. In this system, diagonals and ring are arranged in such a way to act in parallel. to conduct the analyses, a test specimen with pinned and semi-rigid connections was studied using ABAQUS software. Furthermore, numerical analyses were carried out on large-scale models once including the ring with varying thicknesses and also, on the bracing system without the ring (i.e. a link element with high rigidity was replaced for the ring) and lastly, the results were compared with the performance of a concentrically-braced frame (CBF). The results indicate that promisingly, the presence of the link enhances the load-carrying capacity of the system by 9 and 1.75 greater than that of the semi-rigid model and CBF. In general, it was concluded that despite adequate reparability, the proposed system benefits from sufficient ductility and energy absorption capacity.