Design of hybrid passive control systems to mitigate seismic effects on constructions

The proposed work presents a holistic approach that can be efficiently used for developing and qualifying metallic, passive-based hysteretic devices and their possible combination with confined elastomeric discs. These devices are made up of a combination of either two arches or four U-shaped elements where substantial dissipation occurs. In the basic configuration, the devices provide a mono-directional dissipative response but different arrangements can be easily conceived to optimize the performance under multiaxial seismic loading. In this regard, the use of these seismic protection devices makes competitive the employment for both buildings and bridges, due to their simple geometry, adaptability and different scale productions. The adoption of the devices above in a broad scenery of facilities gave the possibility to develop and test most of them. Moreover, in order to identify preferable configurations of the passive devices, the experimental results are i) being interpreted by using high-resolution Digital Image Correlation methodologies for local strain measurement and ii) being assisted by refined numerical simulations carried out in the open-source, finite-element analysis framework OpenSees. The preliminary advancements of these ongoing processes are finally discussed, with particular focus on the modelling techniques employed and the development of new features in the OpenSees environment.