A novel metallic damper, named Welded Wide Flange Fuse (WWFF), is proposed in this study. WWFF utilizes the commonly available welded wide flange section to dissipate the earthquake energy through shear yielding of the web in the longitudinal direction, while the flanges remain elastic. WWFF offers many significant advantages: 1) The use of the welded wide flange sections makes the WWFF very easy to be fabricated into any shapes; 2) The use of the welded plate as the web of the WWFF makes the WWFF very stiff and very efficient to dissipate stable earthquake energy; 3) WWFF is designed to be easily replaceable, hence making the structure equipped with WWFF more resilient towards future earthquakes.
In this study, the force-deformation relationship of the WWFF is investigated through experiment and numerical modelling. The effects of size, slenderness and aspect ratios of the WWFF was examined. Overall, the experimental results show that the newly proposed WWFF is a cost effective, reliable and efficient metallic damper.
Acknowledgement
This work was done by Winda Banjuradja, Lisa Tobber, Jian-Yuan Lin and Dorian Tung under the supervision of Prof. Tony Yang.