Advanced Steel Brace with Multistable Hysteretic Damping Enhanced by a Multilayered Structure

Water wave impacts on jacket structures would result in heavy impulse loads, which induce strong vibrations because of the low damping characteristics of metallic members. In order to resist the wave-impact and suppress the vibration of structures, a novel steel brace that contains a multilayered multistable (MLMS) column is designed for an adjustable product of sufficient stiffness and high damping. According to finite element simulating, the initial stiffness of the MLMS column was almost same as that of the multistable steel column [1], but the energy dissipation was several times larger than that of this column. To understand the hysteresis mechanism of the MLMS column, we performed a hybrid analysis of multilayer lamination and mixed boundary buckling and noted: the soft layer of the MLMS column conducts the neutral axis and bending stiffness, which controls critical buckling load that decides the highness of the hysteresis loop; the eccentric end caps mediates the loading axis of the MLMS column, which induces in the increment of the postbuckling displacement that broadens the width of the hysteresis loop. So, the displacement-force hysteretic relation of the MLMS column can be effectually adjusted by the appropriate physical parameters of the soft layer and the end caps, which is validated by parameter analysis using FEM. Through FEM simulations, we studied a jacket structure assembled with dissipative braces containing MLMS column, which exhibited a several times increment in the decay rate of impact-induced vibration compared to that of the same jacket platform with existing dissipative columns [1]. This study demonstrated the MLMS column is an effective alternative for obtaining high structural stiffness and high damping in marine engineering.