Seismic retrofitting of an existing Chinese building with passive energy dissipation devices according to the design procedures proposed by Bergami et al. and Zhou et al.

After recent strong earthquakes in China, the new Chinese seismic code was issued in 2011 in order to update protection categories for the school buildings and seismic intensities of some cities. As a result, a lot of school buildings need to be retrofitted to satisfy the new seismic code requirements. Therefore the use of Passive Energy Dissipation Devices (PEDDs), such as the Viscous Damper (VD), Metallic Damper (MD) and Viscoelastic Damper (VED), that are popular strategies for seismic retrofitting, are frequently selected by designers. This paper aims to evaluate the effectiveness of using PEDDs as retrofitting technology to upgrade an existing school building with devices designed through direct displacement based [1] or force based design procedure [2]. For that purpose, a real school building located in Shanghai has been retrofitted with Buckling Restrained Braces (BRBs) designed according to the two approaches, and then the structural performance of the different versions of the buildings was evaluated by subjecting each one to a set of seven ground motions recommended by the code. Finally, the seismic effects of different strategies (VD, MD and VED) following the force based approach are discussed in detail.