Novel Scissor‐Jack‐Damper With Spatial Configuration and Enhanced Efficiency

ABSTRACT For a seismic damper, an enlarged damping effect accompanied with a pronounced economic feature (e.g., smaller damper size) is always expected. Commonly, the damper is installed in or linked to the primary structure via some connecting components, whereas the damper and its connecting component act in series. Owing to the limited stiffness of the connecting component, the deformation of the damper could be suppressed, thus weakens the damper's efficiency. To deal with this problem, amplification devices such as the toggle‐brace‐damper and the scissor‐jack‐damper (SJD) have been proposed. In these proposals, a geometrical converting scheme is adopted to transfer the inter‐story drift of the structure to the stroke of the damper. Compared with the toggle‐brace‐damper, the SJD shows a smaller space demand and lower dependency on the stiffness of the connecting components, thus exhibits a better potential for the practical application. To date, most of (if not all) the SJDs are installed in an inter‐story scenario to mitigate the inter‐story drift of building structures. In such cases, the out‐of‐plane instability issue of the SJD is not pronounced since the size of the SJD is not quite large. As the demand of using SJDs in the large‐scale scenarios keeps increase, the out‐of‐plane instability of the SJD starts to draw attention. In view of this problem, a novel 3‐dimensional SJD (3D SJD) configuration is proposed in this study. The 3D SJD achieves better global stabilities, thus facilitates its application in some large‐scale scenarios. The mechanical models of the 3D SJD with different degrees of complexity are derived, and a simplified mechanical model is validated against finite element simulations. An example of the application of the 3D SJD is reported. The results prove, in a quantified way, that the 3D SJD is highly efficient for mitigating the structural seismic response in large‐dimensional scenarios, and the 3D SJD exhibits an elevated energy‐dissipation ability compared with the conventional damper arrangement.