Analytical and Numerical Study of Lead Shear Damper

In this paper, simple and robust constitutive relationship for calculating mechanical properties of lead shear damper (LSD) were developed. LSD is a new type of low cost-low stiffness metallic yielding damper composed of two coaxial steel pipes where their interfacial gap is filled with pure lead. This device dissipates energy through shear plastic deformation of lead section due to the relative axial displacement of steel pipes and can be modeled with tri-linear springs; essential structural variables for this modeling can be found by the developed constitutive equations. The tri-linear spring element can easily be implemented in any commercial structural analysis software. Engineers can easily design any structure equipped with LSDs using the developed constitutive equations in this study. A nonlinear finite element model (FEM) was used to verify the developed constitutive equations.

Keywords:

metallic yielding damper , energy dissipation , constitutive equations , passive control