Design and Analysis of Buildings with Fluidic Self-Centering Systems

Design and analysis procedures for buildings with fluidic self-centering systems are presented and evaluated. The design procedures parallel those for buildings with damping systems in Chapter 18 of the ASCE 7 Standard. The evaluation of the procedures is based on the design and nonlinear response history analysis of 3- and 6- story steel moment frame example buildings. The study establishes the validity of simplified methods of analysis and determines their range of accuracy. Specifically, the simplified methods of analysis provide good and most often conservative estimates of drift and good predictions of self-centering device forces. The results demonstrated that buildings equipped with fluidic self-centering devices and designed per the presented procedures offer benefits of substantial reduction in residual story drift but also reduced peak story drift, peak floor acceleration, peak story shear and base shear forces, and reduced floor acceleration response spectra by comparison to the code-complaint moment resisting framed buildings without fluidic self-centering devices.