Steel structures equipped with BRBs or HDR-based dissipative braces: a simplified displacement-based design procedure

Displacement-Based-Design (DBD) procedures for the design of steel frames with Buckling Restrained Braces (BRBs) and with dissipative braces based on High Damping Rubber (HDR) are described in this paper. In both cases, the DBD procedure is applied to a discrete description of the system and to an equivalent continuous description consisting of cantilever beams with flexural and shear deformability. In the latter case, very simple analytical expressions of normalized stiffness distributions are obtained. Dynamic analyses are performed on a case study in order to validate the proposed design procedures.