Friction Damping for Seismic Protection
A study of whether friction dampers meaningfully protect a building during an earthquake, modelled on UIUC’s Yeh Center in ETABS and checked against a hand-coded response spectrum analysis. The dampers cut peak story displacement by 65–77%.
Team
Nayoung (Eve) Kim, Ehyeok Choi, Shinuk Lee, Hyunji (Becky) Lee (Civil & Environmental Engineering), Jaeyoon Kim (Aerospace Engineering).
Motivation
After the magnitude-7.8 earthquake in Turkey in 2023, nearly every building in Kahramanmaraş collapsed — except the local Civil Engineering Chamber’s. That contrast is what got the team interested in friction dampers: steel plates clamped together that convert seismic motion into heat as they slip, so less force reaches the primary structure.
What we did
- Modelled UIUC’s Yeh Center twice in ETABS — once with friction dampers, once without — and ran both under identical ground motion.
- Defined the ground motion to ASCE 7-16 using site-specific USGS spectral values for Urbana-Champaign.
- Wrote our own response spectrum analysis in code so the simulation could be checked independently rather than taken on faith.
Findings
Measured on the third story, where the two models differed most:
- Peak story displacement down 65.0% in x and 76.7% in y.
- Story shear down 41.5% in x and 52.1% in y.
- Overturning moment down 51.2% in x and 36.4% in y.
- Story stiffness up 67.2% in x and 91.9% in y.
The response spectrum analysis agreed with the simulation: the damped structure settles back to equilibrium far faster, which lowers the risk of fatigue and cumulative damage over a building’s life.
Presented
MRC 2025 and Engineering Open House 2025, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
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