An elastoplastic bracing system for structural vibration control

This paper presents and investigates a new elastoplastic bracing system for passive vibration control of structures. It consists of a deformable elastoplastic metallic core comprising four Arcs around a central Ring and, therefore, the Bracing system is called the “AR-Brace”. Each arc is firmly attached tangentially to the central ring, then to the adjacent arc and finally to a corner of a structural panel, even directly or through a rigid arm. Different design variations of the AR-Brace could be obtained, by means of controlling the construction material and dimensions/thickness of its core, to passively adapt/tune the provided working ranges of stiffness/damping to specific requirements. In this work, some AR-Brace designs were studied to evaluate their efficiency. The device was thoroughly characterized mechanically using finite elements simulations and then modeled mathematically using the Bouc-Wen hysteresis model. The ability of the AR-Brace to control structural vibration and other vibration-dependent responses was investigated via numerical case studies under real and synthetic dynamics excitations. It was found that the displacement-based AR-Brace achieves a good balance between the added lateral rigidity and the provided damping, which was reflected in a remarkable mitigation of the undesirable effects of dynamic excitations, even at moderate levels of supplementary damping by the device.