Semi-active rocking wall systems for enhanced seismic energy dissipation

Rocking walls are an effective method of dissipating structural response energy and mitigating damage during seismic events. Similarly, semi-active resetable devices have shown significant potential to dissipate energy, customize hysteresis behavior and reduce damage. Hence, the addition of a resetable device within a rocking wall can further improve the overall energy management during seismic events. A rocking system, designed for a large open structure, is modeled and the response to a suite of Earthquake records examined for the uncontrolled and device added system. Performance metrics of peak reduction factors, equivalent effective/viscous damping and area enclosed in the Cc vs theta curve are presented for a suite of 10 Earthquakes. Results show that semi-active rocking walls have 3-4x more effective equivalent viscous damping and can provide it every cycle, rather than for 1-2 cycles as with pre-stressed, pre-tensioned passive designs. Such semi-active rocking walls could also be used as supplemental, low-footprint response energy management systems in retro-fitting a variety of structure