Stochastic seismic response of building with super-elastic damper Sourav Gur a , Sudib Kumar Mishra b,nb , Koushik Roy c a Doctoral Student, Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721, USA b Assistant Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, UP, India-208016 c Assistant Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Patna, India-801103 article info Article history: Received 26 May 2014 Received in revised form 8 July 2015 Accepted 1 October 2015 Available online 29 November 2015 Keywords: Super-elasticity Shape Memory Alloy Yield damper Seismic Stochastic response Vibration control abstract Hysteretic yield dampers are widely employed for seismic vibration control of buildings. An improved version of such damper has been proposed recently by exploiting the superelastic force–deformation characteristics of the Shape-Memory-Alloy (SMA). Although a number of studies have illustrated the performance of such damper, precise estimate of the optimal parameters and performances, along with the comparison with the conventional yield damper is lacking. Presently, the optimal parameters for the superelastic damper are proposed by conducting systematic design optimization, in which, the stochastic response serves as the objective function, evaluated through non- linear random vibration analysis. These optimal parameters can be employed to establish an initial design for the SMA-damper. Further, a comparison among the optimal responses is also presented in order to assess the improvement that can be achieved by the superelastic damper over the yield damper. The consistency of the improvements is also checked by considering the anticipated variation in the system parameters as well as seismic loading condition. In spite of the improved performance of super-elastic damper, the available variant of SMA(s) is quite expensive to limit their applicability. However, recently developed ferrous SMA are expected to offer even superior performance along with improved cost effectiveness, that can be studied through a life cycle cost analysis in future work. & 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction A number of metallic yield dampers have been proposed in the past [1–8] as efficient energy dissipating devices for seismic vibration control of structures. Their usages are well acclaimed among the earthquake resistant design community for reduction of structural response and resulting damage under strong ground motion. The idea of metallic yield damper to absorb large portion of the input seismic energy was first introduced by Kelly [1] and Skinner et al. [2]. Since then a number of different types of energy-absorption devices have been proposed, such as X-shaped yield damper by Whittaker et al. [3] and triangular shaped plate damper by Tsai et al. [4]. A metallic damper based on lead extrusion was developed by Robinson and Greenbank [5] and Monti and Robinson [6]. The pure aluminum shear panels as dissipative device in the moment resisting frame has been proposed by Matteies et al. [7]. A detailed account of such devices can be obtained from Soong and Contents lists available at ScienceDirect journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ymssp Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ymssp.2015.10.004 0888-3270/& 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. n Corresponding author. Tel.: þ91 512 259 6731. E-mail address: smishra@iitk.ac.in (S.K. Mishra). Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 72-73 (2016) 642–659