Seyed Amin Mousavi - School of Civil Engineering, University of Tehran
Seyed Mehdi Zahrai - School of Civil Engineering, University of Tehran

A new yielding device is introduced to improve energy dissipation capacity and seismic vibra-tion. The yielding device is composed of steel rebars and a specific mechanical device, called slack free connection, SFC. The main role of the SFC is to eliminate pinching from nonlinear cyclic be-haviour of the diagonal rebars by keeping them tight during load reversals. That is, if the rebar tends to be compressed, SFC would not restrict it and the rebar would be free to move inside to the SFC. In contrast, if the rebar tends to be tensioned, SFC restrains it and behaves like a conventional sim-ple connection. As a result, the X shape rebar brace would have a non-pinched cyclic behaviour which is well suited for seismic applications. Moreover, rebars elements would yield always in ten-sion which is the best yielding mechanism, compared to shear or flexural yielding. The main focus of the current study is on seismic-induced vibrations, however derived formulations are quite gen-eral and they are able to address other excitations as well.

Rebar brace, passive control, yielding damper, energy dissipation