Earthquake response analyses of a full-scale five-story steel frame equipped with two types of dampers Yi-Jer Yu 1 , Keh-Chyuan Tsai 2, * ,† , Chao-Hsien Li 1 , Yuan-Tao Weng 1 and Ching-Yi Tsai 2 1 National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering, Taipei, Taiwan 2 Department of Civil Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan SUMMARY The seismic performance tests of a full-scale five-story passively controlled steel building were conducted on the E-Defense shaking table in Japan in March 2009. Before the tests, a blind prediction contest was held to allow researchers and practitioners from all over the world to construct analytical models and predict the dynamic responses of the steel frame specimen equipped with buckling-restrained braces (BRBs) or viscous dampers (VDs). This paper presents the details of two refined prediction models made and results obtained before the tests. When the proposed analytical modeling techniques are adopted as in the two refined prediction models, the overall prediction accuracy is about 90%. Sensitivity studies conducted after the tests are also presented in this paper. The effects of varying each modeling feature on the response simulation accuracy have been investigated. The analytical results suggest that considering concrete full-composite actions for beam members could improve prediction accuracy by about 20% against using the simplified bare steel beam model. Adopting refined BRB stiffness computed from incorporating finite-element gusset stiffness only improves the overall prediction accuracy by 0.9%. Considering the BRB dynamic loading test results for analytical BRB strength reduces the error by 1.9%. For the VD frame, incorporating the brace and VD stiffness could improve the overall prediction accuracy by about 15%. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Received 20 February 2012; Revised 28 August 2012; Accepted 25 October 2012 KEY WORDS: nonlinear analysis; buckling-restrained brace; viscous damper 1. INTRODUCTION Experimental tests have played a very important role in advancing the practice of structural engineering. For example, experimental results have been utilized as the basis for development of design rules for code implementation in the past, and this role is expected to expand with the requirements of performance- based engineering. In particular, experiments on full-scale structures incorporating realistic boundary conditions and loading conditions are essential for advancing the earthquake engineering technologies. Experimental results also provide a valuable database for the calibration of analytical models. Taking the advantage of the remarkable advancements in computer technology, many general-purpose structural analysis computer programs have been developed for the linear and nonlinear response analyses in both the static and dynamic domains for complex structural systems. Nevertheless, before these computer programs can be utilized with confidence, it is vital that high-quality test data be available for calibration. Thus, experimental results obtained from using the world’s largest earthquake simulation table, E-Defense shaking table have been highly recognized. The efforts of making the test data available to the public have been very much respected. *Correspondence to: Keh-Chyuan Tsai, Department of Civil Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan. † E-mail: kctsai@ntu.edu.tw Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. EARTHQUAKE ENGINEERING & STRUCTURAL DYNAMICS Earthquake Engng Struct. Dyn. 2013; 42:1301–1320 Published online 26 November 2012 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/eqe.2273