Evaluation of the applicability of the Lugre model for modelling the dynamic behaviour of bolt connected frames

Nowadays buildings are becoming taller but also lighter and more slender. Those characteristics make buildings more sensitive to dynamic loads. Damping is an important but most uncertain parameter in the dynamic response of buildings under wind excitations. As a consequence, several researchers attempted to study it. Davenport defined the main sources of energy dissipation in a tall building. Jeary showed the relevance of the friction due to crack formation during high amplitude vibration and established a relation between damping and amplitude of vibration. Tamura made significant improvements in damping prediction by developing practical models and applying data analysis methods, such as the random decrement technique to building measurements. Lagomarsino developed a theoretical model to predict the friction damping in a building. However, he concluded that the model was not directly applicable. Because of the large amount of uncertainties in the damping prediction, developing a theoretical model to assess damping in buildings becomes very difficult. Only empirical formulas based on building measurements are available. All the mentioned researchers stated the importance of friction damping during high amplitude vibration scenarios in the damping prediction. The friction effects in a building can be very complex because they involve different phenomena that occur randomly such as the stribeck effect and stiction effect among others. The occurrence of these phenomena depends on many factors such as the construction material, the number of connected walls, the structural design of the building etc. The principal idea of this study is to find a general damping mechanism which captures the most important friction phenomena occurring in a building in high amplitude vibration scenarios. To this end, a friction damping mechanism called Lund-Grenoble(LuGre) model is implemented. The details of this model are described in the following section. In order to get a better understanding of the LuGre mechanism a simple lab scale experiment has been carried out. In this paper an analytical approach to solve a case study applying the LuGre damping mechanism is presented. Moreover, the solutions of the model are compared with the lab scale experiment.