ISSN 0188 7092

CICLO DE CONFERENCIAS MAGISTRALES

FEBRERO DE 1995

EXPERIENCIA Y DISEÑO DE
AMORTIGUADORES SISMICOS
PARA LA PREVENCION DE
DAÑOS EN EDIFICIOS

DR. DOUGLAS P. TAYLOR

Ciudad de México
4 de Febrero de 1995
 INDICE

Currículum Vitae del Conferencista .............................................. V

Resumen en español de la conferencia ........................................... 1

Conferencia "ExpeLencia y diseño de

amortiguadores sismicos para
la prevención de daños en edificios
Dr. Douglas P. Taylor ........................................................................ 5

Comentarios del Académico de Número

Dr. Cinna Lomnitz Aronsfrau .................................. ...................... 29

Comentarios del Académico de Número

Dr. Roberto Meli Piralla ..................................... ............................. 35

Sesión de pregunta::: y respuestas .................................................. 43

III
Dr. Douglas P. Taylor
CURRICULUM VITAE SINTETICO

El Dr. Taylor, es Director General de Taylor Devices, Inc.,

egresado de la Universidad del Estado de Nueva York en Buffalo, ~
donde se recibió de ingeniero mecánico en 1971. Ese mismo año se
incorporó a la empresa Taylor Devices, especializada en la manu-
factura de amortigt:.adores industriales y militares; fue designado
Director General en abril de 1991; además es Director General de
w1a empresa subsié.iaria, Taylor Developments, Inc. El Dr. Taylor
tiene 21 patentes en Estados Unidos sobre amortiguamiento de
energía hidráulica y absorción de choque.
Ha publicado numerosos artículos en revistas de la Socie-
dad de Ingenieros Automotrices, la Sociedad Americana de Inge-
nieros Civiles, el Consejo de Tecnología Aplicada, la Fundación
Nacional de Potencia de Fluidos, la Asociación de Ingenieros
Siderúrgicos, la Fundación de Ciencia y Tecnología del Estado de
Nueva York, el Cuerpo de Marinos, la Fuerza Aérea, y el Simposio
sobre Choques y Vibraciones.
A partir de 1988 el Ing. Taylor es promotor de proyectos
de diseño en ingeniería mecánica y está afiliado como promotor
industrial en la Universidad del Estado de Nueva York en Buffalo
y la Comisión Cooperativa de Servicios Educacionales del Conda-
do de Erie. Ha participado en estudios experimentales de potencia
antisísmica en cooperación con la Universidad del Estado de
Buffalo y con el Centro Nacional de Investigaciones de Ingeniería
Antisísmica en los fütados Unidos. Es un experto reconocido en el
campo de la atenuación de choques transitorios y está familiariza-
do con los conceptos de aisladores para armamentos y efectos
sísmicos.
Todos los anortiguadores producidos por Taylor Devices
han sido diseñados o revisados previamente por el ingeniero
Taylor antes de entrar a la fase de producción. El ingeniero Taylor

V
se encuentra familiarizado con los aspectos de contratación para
plantas nucleares y militares, métodos de producción y técnicas de
eshidio de productividad, requerimientos de costo, disponibili-
dad, manufactura y diseño de muchos materiales comerciales
ferrosos y no ferrosos, aceros de alta resistencia, aleaciones de
cobalto, de aluminio, de titanio y aceros endurecidos especiales.

VI
 CICLO DE CONFERENCIAS MAGISTRALES
FEBRERO DE 1995

RESUMEN*

EXPERIENCIA Y DISEÑO DE
AMORTIGUADORES SISMICOS PARA LA
PREVENCION DE DAÑOS EN EDIFICIOS

DR. DOUGLAS P. TAYLOR

*Resumen elaborado por la Academia Mexicana de Ingeniería.

 RESUMEN*
El Dr. Taylor describe los orígenes de la utilización de
amortiguadores en diversas estructuras, las cuales se dieron para
usos militares durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial, en que las
detonaciones podía.< alcanzar velocidades de desplazamiento a
campo abierto de 3 a 12 m/seg., desplazamientos superiores a 2
metros y aceleraciones equivalentes a 1,000 veces la de la grave-
dad.
Al final de la guerra fría, a finales de la década de 1980, la
tecnología que se conservaba para uso militar, se hizo de dominio
público, en que, gracias a la utilización de amortiguadores. se
puede reducir el esfuerzo cortante y la deflección de columnas..
durante un evento telúrico, hasta un tercio, lo que permite a las
edificaciones soportar movimientos sísmicos de cierta importan-
cia, sin sufrir daños.
Explica el ponente, los diversos tipos de amortiguadores, así
como su aplicación. Haciendo énfasis en las condiciones base del
diseño del inmueble necesarias para una adecuada solución, ins-
talación y aprovechamiento de dichos ingenios, ejemplificando
con instalaciones realizadas.

*Resumen elaborado por Ja Academia Mexicana de Ingeniería.

3
 CICLO DE CONFERENCIAS MAGISTRALES
FEBRERO DE 1995

CONFERENCIA*

EXPERIENCIA Y DISEÑO DE
AMORTIGUADORES SISMICOS PARA LA
PREVENCION DE DAÑOS EN EDIFICIOS

DR. DOUGLAS P. TAYLOR

*Transcripcion obtenida de la grabación magnetofónica.

 1 am Douglas Taylor, 1 come to you today from the United
States, from a place called Buffalo. Although seismic isolation is
considered a relafr1ely new field today, I've been involved in this
field for the last 30 years. Much of muy work has been with the
United States military and what is not commonly known is that
within the U.S. rr.ilitary many structures are isolated against
seismic shocks and indeed other kinds of shock events -such as
weapons blast- in sorne cases even nuclear detonations. Because
of that, much of the work that 1 have done has never really been
publicized, simply because it was considered military techonology
that was not available to the public. With the end of the Cold War
in 1990, much of the technology that we had developed became
available for sale te the public.
1, maybe to ir.troduce myself a little bit more, I figured I'd
show you people where Buffalo is. This is Buffalo, it is up on the
Canadian border of the Unifed Sta tes andas we like to joke it is not
a seismic zone at all, it is U.S. seismic zone one, which is our lowest
seismic zone.
V\/HERE IS BUFFALO?

BUFFALO
• LOCATED ATTHE WESTERN END OF NEW YORK
• STATE
• FIRST EXPLORED: JESUIT MISSIONARIES FROM
• FRANGE, 1626. ::lRIGINAL CITY BURNED BYTHE
• BRITISH DURIN3 THE WAR OF 1812.
• PRESENT CITY FOUNDED 1938
• BUFFALO AREA POPULATION • 1,500,000
Fig.1

7
 Our argument is that any seismic work that we do up there
will be protected forever, whereas the Californians if they did
seismic work they might just lose all the research in the next
earthquake.
What is Buffalo famous for? In the 1800s we were famous for
ships and parts of ships. As you can see we transitioned and just
after Workd War II the aerea became very famous because it was
the site of the fabrication of the world's first supersonic aircraft,
and indeed through much of World War II Buffalo was noted as a
place that manufactured aircraft. There were approximately 30,000
fighter aircraft bombers and cargo planes manufactured in the area
during the Second World War. As with man y manufacturing cities
in the United States, as the years went on we lost our manufacturing,
much of our aircraft work went out to California and today Buffalo
is famous for students. It is the si te of the largest campus of the Sta te
University System of New York and, as 1 know, we have sorne 22
universities and colleges in the area with a total student enrolment
of 102,000. 1 am associated with the State University of New York
at Buffalo, which is the largest of the university campuses.

WHAT IS BUFFALO FAMOUS FOR:

• 1BOO's WOOO TIMBERS ANO MASTS FOR SAILING SHIPS
• 1900's COMMERCE ANO TRANSPORTATION CENTER
• 1919 FIRST TRANSATLANTIC AIRCRAFT
• 1945 FIRST U.S. JET AIRCRAFT
• 1947 WORLO'S FIRST SUPERSONIC AIRCRAFT
• TOOAY, BUFFALO IS NOTED ASAN EDUCATIONAL
CENTER, WITH 22 UNIVERSITIES ANO COLLEGES
LOCATEO IN THE BUFFALO AREA.
• 1994 BUFFALO UNIVERSITY ANO COLLEGE STUOENTS =
102,000
• LARGEST UNIVERSITY:
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT BUFFALO
ESTABLISHEO 1846
STUOENT ENROLLMENT 24,900
SITE OF THE U.S. NATIONAL CENTER FOR EARTHQUAKE
ENGINEERING RESEARCH

Fig. 2

8
 The University ofBuffalo wasestablished in 1846, its enrohnent
currently is 24,900 students and, more importantly, through the
last few years it has been the site of the U.S. National Center for
Earthquake Engineering Research. It is the si te of, I think what' s the
largest shake-test table in the United States, although our
compatriots at Berkeley are always trying to improve upon the
facilities at the University of Buffalo to take the fome in the
earthquake business back to California.
My company-Taylor D~vices-was founded in 1955 bymy
father. Our business traditionally has been 60% military, 40%
commercial. Much of our work is involved with the isolation of
structures, as I said, against all kinds of shock events. These are
sorne of the typical products we make and applications range from
all branches of the military to steel mills, aluminum mills. We even
do work like at Disney World in Orlando, Florida, where sorne of
the rides where they wish to simulate the effects of earthquakes or
explosions on the patrons of the park would utilize sorne of our
devices in the attenuation of sorne of the events that they create.
What is also unusual is that, unlike the seismic structural
business, or industry, if an engineer here designs a building to be
earthquake resitant, you don't really know if your design works
until the earthquake comes. In the U.S. Military when we designan
isolation system like this we know exactly whether it works or not
beca use we test it. We test with live explosives, we test with the real
ship and it has real people on it. There are not very many people
in the field that many be shocked, simply because many ot them
have died over the years. Sorne of the tests are not successful, much
like many of the earthquake designs.
The theme for today is what the addition of damping would
do to a building to protect it against damage from an earthquake
and what we will see is that the addition of a fluid-damping device
to a building will result in reduced deflection and reduced stress
in the structure, this is a simultaneous reduction. We will reduce
the contents damage because we are damping the motion of the
structure. Because the structure has been damped and its loads
have been reduced, you don't need the construction materials that
you might normally consider for a typical seismic design. Just
consider if you have, for example, a design level shock spectrum.
That spectrum has been run at 2% critica! damping, or 5% critica!
damping. Just imagine the reduction in that spectra if you were
running, perhaps, 30 or 40% critica! damping. It's a tremedous

9
reduction in load, a tremendous reduction in deflection, and it's
available with a relatively small amount of damping devices.
Other improvements include improved bio-dynamics. In
otherwords, if youhavepeople in the buildingwhen the earthquake
strikes their motion would be greatly reduced by the addition of
damping devices.

THEME:
THE DESIGN OF A STRUCTURE SUBJECTED TO
SEISMIC EVENTS CAN BE GREATLY IMPROVED BY THE
ADDITION OF FLUID DAMPING DEVICES

IMPROVEMENT AREAS INCLUDE:

• REDUCED DEFLECTION ANO STRESS
• REDUCED CONTENTS DAMAGE
• REDUCED CONSTRUCTION MATERIALS
• IMPROVED BIODYNAMICS
• ARCHITECTURAL ENHANCEMENT
• REDUCED COST

Fig. 3

Architectural enhancement, beca use you don't need as much

material as you had the need for large sheer walls and cumbersome
strengthening numbers would be reduced. The overall effect is
that you can improve the seismic resistance with damping and at
the same time you will reduce the cost of the structure over an
equivalent, say, rigidized structure, such as the Japanese used in
Kobe. The Japanese have always been very strong on rigid designs,
they even have a name for the earthquake resistance, they call it
"manshin", which I believe translates to "strong as God would
make it", and as we've just seen on the Kobe quake, perhaps their
philosophy ins't that good.
When one is shock isolating, it doesn't matter whether it's a
seismic pulse or wind pulses explosions, the method of solving
your problem is the same, and this is a quote from a man from the
U.S. Navy, Mr. Johansen is in charge of survivability of submarines
from the fleet and in 1989 he made this very simple quote whichhas

10
stayed with me for many years, because I think it defines all the
problems that you would run into in a seismic design:
l. Know the input. As we've seen in Kobe, the Japanese didn't
know the input, as we saw in Northridge, the Californians did
not know the input, and if you don't have a good idea of the
input, you can't design for it.
2. The second problem is to bound the output, that means know
precisely what your structure will take before it breaks. An
example would be the Californians with their steel moment
frame buildings. They thought they knew when the walls would
break, but they were wrong.
3. And the third key: If you know the input and you know what
you can resist in terms of an output, the difference between the
input and the output you mitigate or absorb, using whatever
type of damping or energy-absorbing device that you would
like.

THETHREEKEYSTOSHOCK
ISOLATION
1. KNOW THE INPUT

2. BOUND THE OUTPUT

3. MITIGATE THE DIFFERENCE

Dana Johansen
U.S. Naval Sea Systems Command
1989

Fig. 4

There is nothing more to a shock isolation system than those

three elements. However, sorne times to effect those elements into
the design is very difficult. In the field of building design various
people from time to time have come up with various types of
dampers. We have friction dampers, these can be anything from
sliding plates to bolted connections with slots and things in them.

11
We have visco-elastic devices, actually visco-elastic is something
that my competitors at 3-M have come up with, you can call it a
rubber device, it means just about as much.
We have Tunemasses, the Japanese love Tunemasses, large
pumps and chunks of concrete, water tanks and things like that at
the top of their buildings. They think that' s a good seismic design.
With active control, another mysterious thing, many people have
studied active control, very few have figured out where to get the
power to run the control system. 1lis tened to a Japanese gentleman
give a lecture about active control, he finished his lecture, 1 raised
my hand, 1 asked him to do a quick calculation of the horse power
that would be required to run this control system in this large office
building, the number he carne up with would require the output of
a small fossil fuel power plant hooked up directly to the building
by wires of a size that 1couldn' t conceive and I asked the gentleman
why he was wasting his time, because he could spend all the time
he wanted on control theory but if he couldn't put the necessary
power into a structure he had no solution, he was just theorizing,
and as engineers it is our problem to take the theories and apply
them to practica! solutions.

DAMPING DEVICES FOR BUILDING$

1. FRICTION

2. VISCO-ELASTIC

3. TUNEO MASS

4. ACTIVE

5. FLUID

Fig. 5
Why fluid dampers? Number one, because only a fluid
damper, dueto its response, has the capabilities of reducing stress
and deflection in a structure at the same time. This is a key point,
the response of a fluid damper is 180º out of phase with the column
stress in the building. In other words, if 1 flex my building to a
maximum point, it is at maximum column stress. At that point the

12
velocity of the building, historie velocity, is zero, because it's about
ready to start movi..'1.g back the other way. That means that if I ha ve
a damping device there and the damping device is driven only by
velocity, when the column stress is ata maximum, the force from
the damper is zerc. It also means that when the structure comes
back through its normal center position, when the stresses in the
building are zero from the column loading, at that point the
damper is putting out its maximum amount of force . What this
means is that it has the capability of reducing and deflection on the
structure at the se.me time, no other damping device has that
ability.
Fluid dampers are very old, the first successful use of a fluid
damper structure was by the French in the year 1897. Fluid
dampers are predictable, if I want to build a damper with 100 tons
of output at a speed of one half meter per second, I can build that
damper, I can easL.y test that damper and it would do precisely
what I want it to d:::i for the rest of its life.
WHY FLUID DAMPERS?
• ONLY FLU D DAMPERS REDUCE BOTH STRESS AND
DEFLECTION IN A STRUCTURE DURING A SEISMIC
EVENT, AT DAMPING LEVELS TO 40% OF CRITICAL.
• SUCCESSFULLY USED SINCE 1897, ORIGINATED BY
THE MILITARY
• PREDICTA3LE AT ALL TIMES
• RELATIVELY SMALL SIZE, SELF-CONTAINED
• EASIL Y PRODUCED IN FORCES OF 20 TONNES TO
800 TONNES, DISPLACEMENTS TO PLUS OR MINUS 1
METER
• EASILY INSTALLED IN A STRUCTURE AS DIAGONAL
BRACES O!:l AS PAFT OF A BASE ISOLATION SYSTEM
• STABLE, P1EDICTABLE PERFORMANCE AT ANY
TEMPERATURE
• LONG LIFE, NO MAINTENANCE

Fig. 6
As I said, fluid dampers are predictable at all times, they are
relatively small for the amount of power that they have, they are
easily produced in sizes between 20 tons and 1,000 tons of output.
You can easily have deflections up to one meter, plus or minus one
meter, with no real diffi.culties. They are easily installed at a

13
structure as part of either a diagonal bracing system or as part of
a base isolation system. Fluid dampers are very stable, their
performance is pretty mu ch independent of temperature and their
age and they last a very long time with no maintenance.

DAMPER SPECIFICATIONS
SAN BERNARDINO COUNTY MEDICAL CENTER

DISPLACEMENT = 1.2 METERS

MAXIMUM DAMPING
FORCE = 1,425,000 Nt.
MAXIMUM OPERATING
VELOCITY = 1.5 M/SEC.
POWER DISSIPATION = 2,170,0QO WATIS
LENGTH = 4.37 METERS
EXTENDED
DIAMETER = 36CM
WEIGHT = 13,400 NI.
QUANTITY REQUIRED = 186 UNITS

Fig. 7
How much damping can be used? Typically most engineered
building structures have damping between 1 and 5% of critical.
Compare that with an automotive suspension, the spring and
shock absorbers in your car ha ve damping in the range of 20 to 25%
of critical. Consider also that automobile suspension has evolved,
ithas evolved over ali roads of the world, all different manufacturers
of vehicles and what we have today with 20 to 25% of damping is
able to accept truly randomized transients, in other words, you can
go down the road and you never know what you're going to have
with your car, you could ha ve smooth roads, you could have giant
potholes, isn't it interesting that after this long period of evolution
-we've had automobiles for 90 years now- isn't it interesting
that automobiles have damping of the 20 to 25% critica! range.
If you have a truck, used for off-highway service, you'll find
damping of 30 to 40% of critical. Justas a note, if you want to
prevent resident amplification in a structure that's subjected to
continuous steady state vibration, youneed 50% of critica! damping.

14
Within the military, where we have such tremendously high
transients, it is not unusual to run 2,000% of critical damping. This
is particularly true on nuclear weapons, shock absorbers, where
you're trying to accept and attenuate an extremely violent pulse
from a nuclear device. Por building work right now we are
recommending anywhere between 10 and 45% of critical, it makes
a big difference in the performance of the structure, we can put a
lot of damping into it.

HOW MUCH DAMPING CAN BE USED?

1. MOST STRUCTURES HAVE INHERENT DAMPING OF
1-5% OF CRITICAL.
2. AUTOMOTIVE SUSPtNSIONS HAVE FLUID DAMPERS
OF 20-25% CRITICAL.
3. TRUCK SUSPENSIONS HAVE FLUID DAMPERS OF 30-
40% CRITICAL.
4. DAMPING OF 50% CRITICAL IS NEEDED TO PREVENT
AMPLIFICATION IN A STRUCTURE SUBJECTED TO
FORCED RESONANCE.
5. MILITARY APPLICATIONS OFTEN USE DAMPING UP
TO 2000% OF CRITICAL TO SUPPRESS WEAPONS
SHOCK.
6. TAYLOR DEVICES IS CURRENTLY USING DAMPING
BETWEEN 10% AND 45% OF CRITICAL FOR SEISMIC
ENERGY DISSIPATION IN BUILDINGS.

Fig. 8

Many people askme why fluid dampers havejust been talked

about now, they think it's something we just thought of maybe
three or four years ago. In reality, in 1897 the French bought an
adapted fluid damper into an artillery piece, a large canyon that
their army used. In 1925 the first automotive suspension damper
was invented, oddly enough in Buffalo, by a man named Ralph
Pail, who worked for a company that is totally not related to Taylor
Devices at all, Buffalo for sorne reason is a place where people like
to think of damping devices. The first compressible fluid spring
damper -this is a device where you have restoring forces from the
fluid and damping forces from the fluid-was invented in 1935 by
an Englishman, Sir George Dowdy. Of coursein 1952 the automotive
shock absorbers reached their current form and they went from the

15
old rotary dampers, or rotational dampers of Ralph Pail, to the
1952 General Motors design they use as the typical telescopic type
of automotive shock design you see today. The first commercial
use for the compressible fluid spring damper was a product
invented by my father who founded Taylor Devices. He invented
it in 1952 and several years later decided to start a company that
was devoted to the production of damping devices.
In 1956 was the first use of the damping device in what you
might calla high techonology engineered structure, the U.S. Navy
FAU Crusader fighter aircraft, which was the first supersonic jet
aircraft used by the United States Navy, utilizes Taylor Devices
fuller dampers in the fuse latch of the aircraft to attenuate flight
vibration. What's kind of unique is that the F-8 is a very, very old
and obsolete aircraft, yet if you go to France right now the French
Navy still flies the old Chance Baud F8. The structures have
survived for nearly 40 years, which for a fighter aircraft is unheard
off. Perhaps that's due to the fact it's a damp structure, also we
had ... In 1970 my father rented a fluid damping system with no
moving parts. This enabled us to have a damping device that did
not need the worries of having mechanical parts that could jam or
stick in service. And in 1985, although not for structural use, 1
invented a frictional spooler damper used in space on deploying
solar rays and things like that from satellites.
HISTORY OF FLUID DAMPING
1897: FRENCH M1897 75MM GUN INCORPORATES
ADAPTIVE FLUID DAMPING DEVICE

1925: FIRST FLUID AUTO SUSPENSION DAMPER,

INVENTED IN BUFFALO BY RALPH PEO, ROTARY
TYPE

1935: FIRST COMPRESSIBLE FLUID SPRING-DAMPER

INVENTED BY SIR GEORGE DOWTY OF GREAT
BRITAIN

1952: LINEAR TELESCOPING FLUID DAMPER INTRODUCED

BY DELCO PRODUCTS DIVISION GENERAL MOTORS

1952: FIRST COMMERCIAL COMPRESSIBLE FLUID SPRING

DAMPER, INVENTED BY PAUL TAYLOR, FOUNDER
OF TAYLOR DEVICES
Fig. 9

16
 HISTORY OF FLUID DAMPING
CONTINUED

1956: FIRST DAMPED ENGINEERED

STRUCTURE: U.S. NAVY F-8 CRUSADER
AIRCRAFT, WITH TAYLOR DEVICES
FLUID DAMPERS IN TAIL
1970: FLUIDIC DAMPING SYSTEM, WITH NO
MOVING PARTS, PATENTED BY PAUL
ANO DOUGLAS T AYLOR
1985: FRICTIONLESS FLUID DAMPER
PATENTED BY DOUGLAS TAYLOR

Fig. 10

We began to do experiments with the University of Buffaloto

see if our military damping techonology would be appropriate for
engineered structures. We took a rather small damping device, this
is approximately 50 millimeters in diameter, has a stroke of about
35 millimeters. This particular damper, small as it is, has a rating
of one ton of output. It is taken from the structure of the B-2 stealth
bomber, the latest U.S. Air Force bomber, which like many of the
more modern structures utilizes damping devices within the
aircraft structure, and we received permission from the Air Force
to take that B-2 bomber damper and test it on buildings. We tested
on steel moment framed buildings, we tested it on concrete frames .
We did a particular test of a three-story, three-bay concrete
frame. We tested with all the classical California earthquakes, we
tested with the Mexico City earthquake, we tested with our
Japanese design level quakes, just to make sure that the solutions
we had were good for worldwide use.
To give you an example of the performance, this is not from
the concrete structure, this is from a steel-moment framed structure,
typical of California, it's a three-story. We subjected the structure
to one third of the famous 1940 El Centro earthquake. As you can
see, this is our typical forced deflection, or stressed deflection
curve in the structure. We are just starting to yield the moment
frame, you can see the little loop there. The key points is one third
El Centro are drifters .6" and our sheer is a little bit over .2 Gees.
We took that structure, we put only two fluid dampers. two of
those small B-2 dampers, on to the lowest floor, and then we
repeated the test.

17
 1-STORY, NO DAMPERS, EL CENTRO 33.37.

0.3

f-
J:
(!)

~
oc O.O
l1í
:e
U)
w
U)
<
CD

-0.3
-0.6 o.o 0.6
DRIFT(in)

Fig. 11

This is our response: First, this is not El Centro at one third,

this is 100% of El Centro. We have tripled the earthquake, yet the
drift is just what it was befo re with one third of El Centro and again
we're slightly over .2 Gees. So we've done it without reducing the
stress or without increasing or deflection in the structure. We've
tripled the earthquake resitance by adding only two tiny fluid
dampers to it. What these two dampers are damping us up to about
20% of critical, so these are the types of improvements that you can
get. Notice how with the fluid damper you can still see the stress
cranker in the building column, but know how when the building
stresses would be at max the total force in the structure is virtually
limited to what the strained deflection curves were in the columns.
That' s because the fluid damper here, where there is no stress in the
columns, is putting out its maximum amount of force, and here
where there is maximum stress in the building the fluid dampers
are rapidly going down to zero force. This is the out-of-phase
response that 1 mentioned.

1·STORY. 2 DAMPERS, EL CENTRO 100%

0.3

!i:C>
~
"~
l:
o.o

"'w
~
.Q,3
-0.6 o.o 0.6
DRIFTQn)

Fig. 12

18
 While we were doing ali this a very strange thing happened,
we had a real application come in. This is the San Bemardino
Country Medical Center, it's a new medical center being built in
California that consists of five buildings and they have a problem
with this center. First, it's in a desert area, so it's sandy soil, they
had worries about liquid faction. Secondly, the money to build the
hospital carne from the U.S. Government, they insisted that one
hospital service the cities of San Bemardino and Ontario, California,
so they wanted to place the hospital midway between the two
cities. By doing that they ended up placing it less than 10 kilometers
from the San Andrew's fault and about five kilometers from an
intersecting fault. Because of that, they hada real isolation problem,
and because of its short squad height and the fact that's on soil
subject to the liquid faction, it is on based isolation rubber bearings.
When they took themagnitude of the maximum credible earthquake
that they expected into this building they needed a deflection if
they just used the base-isolation bearings and needed a deflection
in excess of plus or minus two meters and they could not build
base-isolation bearings that big, they had no idea how to bring ali
the utility lines, their electric, water, power, whatever, into the
hospital and allow plus or minus two-meter deflection. They
didnt' know how to have their walkways handle a plus or minus
two-meter deflection, so we decided to damp the structure instead.
We took the structural damping level to 45% of critica! in the
system, with approximately 32 to 35% being provided by fluid
dampers, the other 5 to 10% of critica! was provided from the base-
isolation bearings themselves.

Fig. 13
By doing this, we were able to reduce the anticipated deflection
under this maximum credible earthquake from plus or minus two
meters with the base-isolation bearings alone to plus or minus .7
meters with the base-isolation bearings and the dampers. With

19
normal California code they had us take and increase our stroke-
had to put a safety factor on the whole mass because it is a
hospital-so we ended up with plus or minus .7 meters, which
ends up to be a somewhat greater deflection when you're actually
making the damper. Note that there are 186 of these dampers. This
is not a small damping device, 186 pieces, they weigh 13,000
newtons a piece. The power generation, that's the power that is
dissipated by the damper, is 2,170 kilowatts, a lot of energy. Horse
power wise it's 3,000 h.p.

NURSING TOWEA
WITH DAMPEAS

Fig. 14
The question and the problems that we faced: One, how to
put these dampers into the structure, and these are a couple of
quick slides showing how that was done. You can see the base-
isolation bearing there, you can see the damper that is monitored
in parallel. A view from above -this is on the nursing tower- this
shows the arragements of the dampers -this was done in such a
way to minimize the torsional response of the structure.
The next question was how did we build and test these
dampers. No shake-table facility exists that can test a damper that
will dissipate 3,000 h.p., so what we had to do was build a 50
kelyph, 25-ton capacity scale damper. The procedure was to test
that with a cyclic actuated test at the State University of Buffalo
laboratory, then perform draft testing on it. Our normal way of
testing our military devices is to take a large weight, lift it up in the
air and free-ball it under the damper. That allowes us to generate
almost an infinite amount of horse power very easily. So "\Ne would
take these dampers, we would cycle and test them at the university,
drop test them at our facility, compare the results. If we get good
coalition then we would take the full-scale dampers that cannot be
cycled tested and we would only drop test those.

20
 We took this damper, these particular devices, tuned to work
with the base-isolation bearing, so if we test the pure damper alone
you have an almost square curve. This particular response is at .06
hertz, about one inch per second, 25 millimeters per second
velocity, and we tested at various frequencies and speeds, just
about one hertz velocity of 17 inches per second, again we're up in
the 50 tip output range, 25-ton output range. The hospital people
insisted that we verify that fluid dampers don't change their
performance with temperature. This has been a problem with the
visco-elastic the rubber devices, as temperature changes their
response changes quite rapidly. As you can see testing it, now
again this is all English, so this is roughly 20 Celsius, OCelsius, and
that must be what, 35 Celsius. As you can see, the response change
from the damper, from cold to hot, is very very minimal, and this
is over its entire velocity range which, for the scale unit was from
zero up to about 8 centimeters per second or so. No, l've got to
apologize, I'm lousy with my trick dimensions. And, again, this is
right up to your 40 kept, 50 kept output of the damper.
This is the drop test fixture that we use to verify that drop
testing was a successful test method for the full-scale dampers and
indeed we ran correlation between our cycled tests with the
university and our drop tests. Correlation was within a few
percent, which is well within instrument accuracy. Given that, they
told us to go ahead and actually build the full-size dampers.
This is the drop test on the first of the full-size dampers. The
damper is here, you can see its piston rod extends up there. This is
our drop way, this drop way goes well up into the air. It was
approximately a 22,000 Lbs. drop way. We lifted it up high enough
so that it impacted the damper at speeds up to 11/2 meters per
second. This is a plot of damping force vs. velocity for the full-size
damper. Now, again, this is nota linear curve, we were tuning this
particular damper to work with a base-isolation bearing. One of
the tricks that we can do is to change the damping exponent. This
particular damper optimized in their system with a fairly low
damping exponent, less than 1, and this was the output curve,
these were the upper and lower bounds that the engineer wanted
us to stay within and we stayed well within those curves.
This is a picture of the full-size device. Someone in California
said that we worked on one of the world's largest trucks, actually
is more than most trucks could even carry and we're currently
producing 186 of those for the hospital.

21
 Fig. 15

Other designs with fluid dampers. Most structural programs

you get into or if you m.e hand calculations to design your
structure, you' d like to use linear damping.
Linear damping where your force is proportionate to velocity.
Most software codes are on linear damping, most of your spectral
work is being done with 5% of critical or 2% of critical damping and
they always assume linear or so called viscous damping. Linear
damping is usually best if your damper is going to be used as part
of a structural bracing system on a fixed-based building.
The other type of damping that is possible to use is what is
called low-exponent damping. Low-exponent damping, X is equal
to CV raised to the power o: K. K is your low exponent, it could be
anywhere between .3 and .9 C is, of couse, a constant number,
which is determined by the analysis, and in general low-exponent
damping is best used if you have your buildbg on rnme sort of a
based-isolation system. Low~exponent dampbg is not particularly
easy to model and there arrn't very many sof':ware codes that can
handle it, so man y of the engineers we work for prefer to use linear
damping.

22
 DESIGNING WITH FLUID DAMPERS
*** LINEAR DAMPING ***
F C.V
F Damping Force
C Damping Constant
V Velocity
LINEAR DAMPING USUALLY IS BEST IF THE DAMPER
IS TO BE USED AS PART OF A STRUCTURAL
BRACl'NG SYSTEM
*** LOW EXPONENT DAMPING ***
F = CVK
WHERE K CAN VE A SPECIFIED VALUE
BETWEEN .3 ANO .9
LOW EXPONENT DAMPING USUALLY IS Bff- IF THE
DAMPER IS TO BE USED AS PART OF A BASE ISOLATION
SYSTEM
Fig. 16

Design parameters fluid dampers are available anywhere

from a 5-tons output force to a 1,000 tons of output force. They can
be set for any velocity that is appropriate for your structure and,
of course, velocity is in the structure, if you've got a tall building
you may be setting the dampers for inner story velocities of only
one to two inches per second to 25 millimeters per second. If you
have the base-isolated structure you'll be moving ata much higher
velocity.

DESING ANO APPLICATION

PARAMETERS
AVAILABLE TAYLOR DEVICES FLUID VISCOUS DAMPER
SIZES:
5, 1O, 25, 50, 100, 150, 200, 300, 500, 1000
TONNES OUTPUT FORCE.
DAMPERS ARE SET FOR CUSTOMER SPECIFIED
MAXIMUM VELOCITY ANO DAMPING FUNCTION.
MOST ECONOMICAL
SIZES ARE USUALLY 25, 50, 100, 150, 200
TONNES OUTPUT.
Fig. 17

23
 Typically of these dampers for civil engineering use, piston
rods are always stainless steel because we expect the damper to last
the life of the building, your fluid is a non-flammable silicone,
unlike petrochemical based oils your silicone does not flash if you
ha ve a fire, and this is the fluid we've used in our military dampers
for over 30 years.

STANDARD FEATURES:

STAINLESS STEEL PISTON ROO

NO N-FLAM MABLE SI LICONE DAMPI NG FLUI O

NO MAINTENANCE CONSTRUCTION, WITH

PATENTED TAYLOR SEALS

ALLOY STEEL CYLINDERS

Fig. 18

Construction is what we call, a no-maintenance construction,

there are no ports to add fluid to us, there is no charging required,
you don't have to change seals, once it's put into the building there
should be no need to touch it. The seals we use are of our own
design, we have a patent on them. There's a seal that's designed to
go for long periods without a lot of use, because hopefully you're
not going to have too many earthquakes occur in the vicinity of
your building.
The analytical methods you can use conventiona] shock
spectror tables, the exception being you just reduce your spectra
for using much more greater percentages of critica! damping than
you normally use. If you're using transient methods we usually
recommend starting with about 25% of critica! damping as a
baseline and you can attempt to try your model with different
amounts of damping above and below the 25% value to see if you
can optimize for a minumum number of dampers or a minimum
amount of steel, whichever you' d like.

24
 ANALYTICAL METHODS:

SPECTRAL - WITH SPECTRA REDUCED FOR

INCRASED DAMPING LEVEL IN THE RANGE OF
10%-40% OF CRITICAL .

TRANSIENT - WITH 25% CRITICAL OAMPING AS

A BASELINE, 10%-50% OF CRITICAL MAY
PROVIDE REDUCED COST FOR OPTIMAL LOW
STRESSES.
Fig. 19
Over the last few years people have asked about availble
software systerns and software codes to analyze structures with
fluid darnpers. If you have a base-isolated structure these are two
PC-based prograrns which are readily available on the open
rnarket which can analyze virtually any kind of a base-isolated
structure with virtually any kind of a darnping device, they can
handle all levels of handling the early and the darnpers and the
base-isolation elernents. If you have a fixed-base structure, if it's
steel, you've got prograrns ranging frorn E tabs, which run on
rninicornputer, drained to the ax which rnay run on sorne of the
better PCs, set at 90, which norrnally gets you into the larger
cornputer, concrete you've got E tabs and 1 dark, again you've got
drain too, to D.
If you' re into a general prograrn, if you have a real monumen-
tal structure and don't want to rness with either of the series of
srnaller prograrns here, these here are rnajor prograrns thatnorrnally
would require a rnain-frame cornputer. Nastran of course, dates
back to the 1960s, it will analyze anything, it's very unfriendly,
Ansis is similar to a Nastran, Abacus is in the sarne range, Diner 2-
D and 3-D are sorne of the rnost popular codes in the United States
right now, that are, you rnight say, the newcorners to this particular
business.
SOFTWARE CODES:
BASE ISOLATED STRUCTURES-
30 BASIS, TUTSIM
FIXED BASE STRUCTURES-
STEEL: ETABS, ORAIN 20-X, SAP-90
CONCRETE: ETABS, IOARC, ORAIN 20-X
GENERAL ABACUS, NASTRAN, ANSYS,
OYNA-20, 30
Fig. 20
25
 Just to quickly outlines the method analysis, we recommend
for your first analytical run to take your structural model, give it
global damping, an overall linear damping ratio, just to see how
the structure likes damping, to see what happens to it when you
add damping, to see how your deflection is reduced, how your
stress is reduced. That enables you to remove material from the
building, loosen the structure up a bit, let the dampers do more of
the work and that reduces your construction cost. Once you've got
a global damping that works, then you can get into your computer
model and begin breaking that global damping into discreet
damping elements put in different areas in the building. Normally
you place the damper at whatever points in your structure are
deflecting the most. Dampers like a lot of deflection.
The third step is to obtain a rough price in the damping
system, then you test your damping solution by attempting to
remove sorne of the dampers, see how that increases your stresses,
compare that to the decrease in cost from using less dampers. It's
a very normal first order optimization.

METHOD FOR ANALYSIS:

1.TEST MODELED STRUCTURE WITH GLOBAL
LINEAR DAMPING, STARTING AT 25%, TRYING
VARIOUS VALUES IN 10%-50% RANGE TO
DETERMINE OPTIMAL RESPONSE.
2.BREAK GLOBAL DAMPING INTO DISCRETE
DAMPING, PLACING DAMPERS AT POINTS OF
MAXIMUM DEFLECTION IN THE STRUCTURE .
3 .OBTAIN DAMPER ROUGH PRICING, THEN
DECREASE DAMPING BY REMOVING 10% OF
THE DAMPERS, TO COMPARE COST OF
DAMPERS RELATIVE TO STRUCTURAL
RESPONSE.
Fig. 21

That covers the basic dampers that we build, now I figure I'l l
take one slide to show you where we're off to next in our defense
technology. This is an act of control, an act of isolation system.
Know how I commented earlier that acts of control were terrible
because you can never provide the power. This is an odd one, it
runs on a flashilght battery. It's maximum control power is 2 D-size
flashlight batteries, such as you can buy at any store. This coin here

26
-this is a U.S. quarter- so it's about the size of your five-peso
coin, to give you an idea of the size.
Each one of these dampers is rated at a half ton of output.
There are variable spring right, if you can control the spring rights
then you can control the damping. This is used inside a misssile,
this is a new missile tha t' s being developed to rep lace the American
Patriot missile that was used during the Gulf War, and this
particular act of isolation system runs on three volts, it will work
in out of space, it is not cheap, it has a frequency response, it'll
respond in about five milliseconds and either change it's spring
right or its damping right, as yo u would desire, and we're currently
using this on the terminal guiding system of the missile, as the
missile attempts to find its target the isolation system allows the
gimbling missile to look around and seek or attempt to find the
target, when it finds the target the damping and the spring rates are
greatly increased because as this particular missile seeks its target
it maneuvers at tum rate up to about 45 Gees, very violent missile.
Because of that we need a very good isolation system because we
are carrying effectively the missile's guiding set.

Fig. 22

27
 This is what we're doing with Defense now, oddly enough
there's a test starting at the University of Buffalo with an active
seismic damper that also runs on three volts, so we're already
starting the spinoffs on this technology back into the seismic
community and we figure if we can get an active system to run on
flaslight batteries, then we even cover for things such as what
happened today when our view slide projector died, because
batteries you can always trust.
1 thank the Academy for having me here today and I thak all
of you for being such gracious listeners. Thank you.

28
 COMENTARIOS*

DR. CINNA LOMNITZ ARONSFRAU

ACADEMICO DE NUMERO
ACADEMIA MEXICANA DE INGENIERIA

*Transcripcion obtenida de la grabación magnetofónica.

 Creo que todos hemos escuchado con mucho interés y,
espero, compartimos la impresión que siento al escuchar la clarí-
sima exposición y el impresionante despliegue de tecnología que
nos ha hecho el favor de presentar Douglas Taylor.
No tengo mucho que agregar, aparte de que quería yo tratar
de elaborar sobre algunas de sus observaciones en el contexto de
nuestro problema aquí en la ciudad de México.
Este es el espectro del sismo de 1985, tal como fue registrado
en la Secretaría de Comunicaciones y Transportes; abajo tenemos
dos de las normas, primero la norma que era la norma vigente en
1985 y luego la norma actual.
RESPONSE SPETRA ANO DESIGN SPECTRA
O;.MPl~IG FACTOR= 5%

30 35 rn ~
ºº·º
~ º" LO
" 2.0 25

g
~
§
8
~ ~
ó o
~

~ ~ ~
~
§
E~ o

'.i ~
~ :l
05 LO ... 20
?ER!OO(SEC\
2.5 3.0 3.5

Fig.1
Como ustedes ven, hay un pico muy importante que rebasa
la especificación de la norma y es ese pico el que nos tiene que
preocupar, nos preocupa, y es esa energía la que está contenida en
este pico, la que tendrían que absorber los mecanismos de
amortiguamiento, los amortiguadores.
¿Cuál es el "input" que tenemos? Bueno, el de arriba es un
diagrama del input del sismo del 85; en el eje de las "X" tenemos
el tiempo, y en el eje de las "Y" la frecuencia, o sea, tenemos, en este
caso, un período del orden de 4 segundos, mayoritario, a partir de

31
los 50 segundos de iniciado el temblor, este registro no es de la
Secretaría, sino que es de la Central de Abastos.

a) 5

Cl .!==':
Q) 4
Cf)

t!:
6
D.. 3 Tp
~
w
F 2

b)

Cl
Q) 4
en
6
D.. 3
~
w
F 2

Fig. 2

32
 Abajo tenemos otro ::egistro que corresponde a un sismo
japonés también registrado en una laguna, una zona lagunar, o sea,
es un tipo de registro muy especial, no se parece mucho a lo que
podría ser el sismo de Northridge.
¿Qué es lo que sucede con nuestro material, con el lodo de La
ciudad de México? Es que su rigidez decae al aplicarse un esfuerzo,
el esfuerzo sísmico hace que la rigidez del material disminuya
abruptamente y con un centésimo de radián de esfuerzo decae la
velocidad a la mitad. Entonces podríamos hablar de licuación
porque en realidad la rigidez del material baja muy drásticamente
hasta cero.

Fig. 3

Y, finalmente, quería recordar nuestra situación geográfica.

La zona sombreada es la zona que se dañó durante el sismo del 85,
que es prácticamente toda la zona blanda, pero tenemos aquí el
contorno de la antigua isla de Tenochtitlan, que es la zona que se
dañó un poco menos porque estaba el suelo más compactado, pero
la orilla de la isla y la orilla del antiguo lago son las zonas que más
se dañan y tenemos que tener una respuesta a ese problema.
Creo que no tengo mayormente nada más que agregar,
aparte de agradecer a Douglas Taylor por su excelente exposición.

33
 COMENTARIOS*

DR. ROBERTO MELI PIRALLA

ACADEMICO DE NUMERO
ACADEMIA MEXICANA DE INGENIERIA

*Transcripcion obtenida de la grabación magnetofónica.

 Mis comentarios consisten en algunas reflexiones sobre el
uso que se está dando a los sistemas y dispositivos para reducir la
respuesta sísmica. Esto proviene de la observación que las fuerzas
que se introducen en los edificios, en los sismos, son bastante
mayores que las que se había pensado que podían ser.
En los sismos recientes, desde cuando se tiene ya una
instrumentación muy amplia del terreno y de edificios para medir
cuál es la magnitud de los movimientos tanto del terreno como de
los mismos edificios, se ha encontrado que esas fuerzas son mucho
mayores de lo que se pensaba. Si vemos los últimos sismos, de
hecho desde el sismo de la ciudad de México y después el sismo de
Loma Prieta de 1989, el sismo de Los Angeles del año pasado, el
sismo de Kobe, se encuentra que las aceleraciones del terreno son
mucho mayores de lo que se pensaba.
Sa/g
25
- SCT EW·'19 SEP 85
" " " CORRAUTOS NS-17 OCT 09
2 •'
''
1.5

0.5

1 1.5 2 2.5 3
PERIODO (seg )

Fig.1
En la figura 1, se representan sólo dos de estos registros, uno
es el espectro de SCT en México en 85 y el otro es uno de los
registros obtenidos en el sismo de Loma Prieta de 1989. Si vemos
las aceleraciones espectrales, o sea las fuerzas que se pueden
introducir en estructuras con 5% de amortiguamiento, en el regis-
tro de Loma Prieta, se llega a cerca de dos veces la gravedad. En el
sismo de Northridge del año pasado la aceleración del terreno, que
aquí fue del orden de 0.6 ó 0.7g llegó a ser la aceleración del terreno

37
un poco mayor todavía y en el sismo de Kobe de hace algunas
semanas también anduvo muy poco abajo de una G, lo que quiere
decir que los espectros andan arriba de 2.Sg.
Esas fuerzas obviamente es muy difícil y muy costoso resis-
tirlas con la propia capacidad de los.elementos estructurales si se
mantienen los amortiguamientos a valores del orden del 5% como
son los que se suponen para el trazo de estos espectros.
En la ciudad de México, afortunadamente, las aceleraciones
del terreno no son de ese tamaño, son mucho menores, de hecho no
se han medido aceleraciones arriba del 0.20g. sin embargo, por las
características del suelo en la zona blanda del lago se tienen
amplificaciones muy grandes para estructuras de período largo,
de arriba de 1.5 segundos, donde se pueden alcanzar aceleraciones
espectrales del orden de una vez la gravedad.
La problemática, entonces, es bastante diferente cuando se
trata de edificios situados en la zona blanda de la ciudad de
México, que cuando tratamos de edificios situados en zonas que
están cerca de posibles epicentros donde puede haber sismos muy
violentos.
Los dispositivos que más éxito han tenido en el segundo caso,
son los aisladores sísmicos, los que esencialmente tratan de llevar
el período de la estructura a zonas de período largo en donde, si
vemos la gráfica punteada, las fuerzas que se introducen son muy
pequeñas. Este tipo de dispositivo obviamente no tiene un efecto
igualmente favorable si hablamos de la ciudad de México en donde
al alargar el período puede llevar las estructuras a las zonas
precisamente en donde las fuerzas son mayores. Entonces, es en
condiciones similares a las de la ciudad de México donde son
particularmente útiles los dispositivos que agregan
amortiguamiento a la estructura; no tratan de cambiar su período,
sino de aumentar el amortiguamiento, que se supone es el orden
de 5% cuando las estructuras no tienen ningún dispositivo espe-
cial, y puede aumentar a 10 ó 20%, ó 30%, como mencionaba el Dr.
Taylor, de manera que este espectro en lugar de tener al pico de la
figura, queda prácticamente horizontal con aceleraciones
espectrales máximas que no pasan de 15 ó 20% de la gravedad.
Entonces, ya sean los amortiguadores o, como en el Hospital
de San Bemardino que mencionaba el Dr. Taylor, combinaciones
de aisladores más amortiguadores, son soluciones que pueden
reducir mucho la respuesta de edificios y pueden permitir que
estos se diseñen con fuerzas mucho menores que las que habría que
usar si no se tuvieran estos dispositivos.

38
 El uso de estos dispositivos en realidad ha sido limitado por
varias razones, aunque se han desarrollado desde hace mucho
tiempo. En México tenemos un ejemplo, que es el de los aisladores
que desarrolló hace más de 30 años el Ing. Manuel González Flores,
los usó en algún edificio que todavía sigue en funcionamiento. Esto
no ha proliferado por varias razones, principalmente por la des-
confianza de los ingenieros hacia usar dispositivos cuyo funciona-
miento no conocen bien y que no es muy sencilla la manera de
considerarlos en el análisis. O sea, yo creo que una de las limitacio-
nes principales es que los que calculan no saben cómo analizar un
edificio con esos dispositivos y cómo diseñar adecuadamente su
posición exacta dentro del edificio -quizá esto segundo es lo más
crítico- y es probablemente la razón que ha limitado su uso.
Sin embargo, ha habido varias aplicaciones a partir de 1985,
principalmente en disipadores de los que se pueden llamar de tipo
viscoso o de tipo elasto-plástico, no tanto a base de fluidos como
los que presenta el Dr. Taylor, sino a base de elementos de acero
que, al fluir, la fluencia de ese acero produce un amortiguamiento
adicional.
Estos dispositivos en forma esquemática se pueden usar en
una aplicación muy simple como un marco experimental que se ha
aprobado en el Centro Nacional de Prevención de Desastres desde
hace algún tiempo, y que sirve para evaluar distintos dispositivos.
Es un marco de acero, de un piso, hay otro de dos pisos, y se
colocan las diagonales dejando un espacio en el cual se coloca un
dispositivo que puede tener distinta forma geométrica. En este
caso es simplemente una placa, como el alma de una viga que, al
ser sometida al movimiento lateral y al ser sometida a fuerzas
cortantes muy elevadas se pandea y fluye y, al hacerlo, disipa
energía en forma importante.

Marco con contravientos en V invertida

Fig. 2

39
 Este es un dispositivo experimental, los que se han usado en
la práctica no son tanto éstos sino los que ha usado el Ing. Enrique
Martínez Romero, que los ha aplicado en varios edificios reforza-
dos a partir de 1985, que son los llamados Adas, en que la fluencia
se da no como en la placa de la figura sino por la flexión de unos
elementos en batería, o sea, una serie de elementos cuyo número
depende de la fuerza cortante que se quiere absorber en este
dispositivo, entonces su fluencia produce un amortiguamiento
que es del mismo orden del que menciona el Dr. Taylor. Se
considera que estos dispositivos son de una tecnología más simple,
probablemente de costo menor, y que por eso se han usado más, sin
embargo no creo que haya una gran diferencia ni en su funciona-
miento ni en su costo con los que ha presentado aquí el Dr. Taylor
y quiero mostrar algunos, un par de casos, de los edificios que ha
reforzado el Ing. Martínez Romero; edificios existentes de concre-
to, de tipo de losa plana, sumamente flexibles, en los cuales su
principal debilidad es precisamente que su alta flexibilidad les da
grandes deformaciones laterales y el introducir elementos de este
tipo disminuyen en mucho sus desplazamientos ante un sismo y,
por lo tanto, se reducen los daños no estructurales y se generan
menos molestias a los ocupantes.
Además de estos sistemas, se han desarrollado algunos otros
que hasta donde sé no se han aplicado en la práctica. El Ing. Manuel
Aguirre del Instituto de Ingeniería ha desarrollado unos sistemas
a base de óvalos, en los cuales al doblarse y desdoblarse las placas
de estos óvalos, al estar sometidos a fuerza cortante también se

Fig. 3

40
disipa energía y dan lugar a ciclos cargadeformación como los que
se muestran en la figura, que son sumamente estables y, como ven,
por su forma disipan una gran cantidad de energía.
En resumen, me parece que ya es una tecnología que está lista
para usarse y que debería incrementarse su aplicación, sobre todo
en la situación de la ciudad de México donde, repito, y quiero
enfatizar esto, el problema sísmico no es que se introduzcan en el
terreno grandes aceleraciones o grandes fuerzas, sino que se tienen
ciclos muy armónicos con un período muy determinado para cada
sitio que puede ir, según la zona de que se trate, entre 1 y 3 ó 4
segundos y que se tiene que evitar el fenómeno de resonancia, o
sea, de tener estructuras cuyo período sea similar al del suelo.

Fig. 4
Como el período del suelo está relativamente bien determi-
nado, pero el período de la estructura es difícil de determinar, y
además puede variar mucho según el nivel de excitación, no puede
simplemente confiarse en que el período de la estructura esté
despegado del período del suelo. Esto es poco efectivo porque,
como decía, este período puede cambiar, entonces el emplear un
dispositivo que introduzca un amortiguamiento muy elevado es
una manera sumamente efectiva de proteger a una estructura
contra la posible resonancia y contra su posible colapso. Los
dispositivos que ha propuesto el Dr. Taylor son, desde luego,
tecnológicamente muy adecuados para poder resolver este proble-
ma. Gracias.

41
SESION DE PREGUNTAS Y RESPUESTAS*

"Transcripcion obtenida de la grabación magnetofónica.

PREGUNTA:
¿Nos podría usted dar una idea muy general de precios
de amortiguadores en edificios comunes?

RESPUESTA:
Typically a damper of 50-tons capacity or output force,
perhaps with the deflection in the plus or minus 100 millimeter
range, for a commercial building, would run around
US$2,500.00 dollars each. Those larger dampers that you saw
at the San Bernardino Hospital, those are 160 tons output witln
a very long stroke, up in the 1.2 meter available stroke range.
Those dampers are more expensive, they are running
approximately US$ l 7,000.00 dollars each. There again, that' s
a very large hospital, that's over one million square foot of
flush base in the San Bernardino Center.

PREGUNTA:
Se refiere a los precios unitarios y seguramente ustedes
están preguntándose cuántos de estos amortiguadores
entran en los edificios.

RESPUESTA:
Again, to give an example, we're redoing a 3-story URM
or brick hotel in the Sacramento, California orea now, the
building is going to be upgraded to meet the more recent
codes and, of course, URM construction hasn't been used in
California since the l 930s, because of its seismic hazard. Your
retrofeed cost on the entire hotel requires 16 dampers and
the total cost would be approximately US$85,000.00 dollars.
In comparison to the sorne structure with sheer walls.
which was the other way to fix this particular structure, the
cost for the sheer walls was three times the cost of the

45
structure with the dampers, plus the owner was unhappy
because if they put sheer walls in it would destroy the
architectural appearance of his hotel and he wished to
retain the old California style of the architecture. So in this
case not only were the fluid dampers much cheaper than
sheer wall construction, the owner demanded it because he
wished to preserve the architectural enhancements in this
building.

PREGUNTA:
¿En qué año se empezaron a utilizar los amortiguadores
en edificios elevados y con éxito? y ¿nos podría proporcio-
nar nombre de algunos de estos edificios u obras?

RESPUESTA:
In tall buildings, commercial structures, fluid dampers, to
the best of my knowledge hove never been used. There are
buildings in the New York City area that are using friction and
visco-elastic damping devices, and hove used them
successfully for years.
One example would be the Twin Trade Center Towers in
New York City, the ones that were attacked by the terrorists'
bomb a while ago. The second example would be the
CityCorp Towers in New York City, also which are using
hysteretic type damping devices. Do they've been using tall
buildings for quite a while. Within the military most military
buildings aren't tall, they're usually less than five to ten stories
in height so much of the isolation on those buildings is dating
back to the l 950s, but 1wouldn 't consider the response of a
short squat military building as being the sorne as a tall
building . So the use of damping in tall buildings has been
largely used in the New York City area. 1believe there is one
tower in the city of Seattle, Washington that is running
hysteretic-type damping and, again, they were used
successfully approximately 15 years ago.

PREGUNTA:
¿Cómo repercuten los espectros de respuesta del terre-
no en el diseño de los amortiguadores sísmico s? y ¿para qué
frecuencias se obtienen los mejores resultados?

46
RESPUESTA:
A fluid-damping device is affected only by velocity. lt's
response is independent of frequency and they will function
at any frequency from DC or zero up to approximately 500
cycles per second. Normally, for an earthquake, you're
interested in a much lower frequency range, soy from DC up
to about 1Ocycles per second, as a maximum, and the fluid
dampers will fully respond with no change in output over that
frequency range. So, OQain, they're strictly driven by the
velocity, that's ali they understand, they do not change the
response with frequency, they don't change the response
with temperature, with age, just with respect to velocity that
they're being moved at.

PREGUNTA:
¿Dónde es más recomendable colocar los amortigua-
dores sísmicos y por qué no sólo absorber la fuerza sísmica
desde la cimentación?

RESPUESTA:
O.K., the advantage of using the seismic dampers is that
you require less foundation with the dampers than you would
if you had no dampers.
The placement of the dampers: if you hove a tall
building we normally recommend that the dampers be
placed at whatever floors in the building are exhibiting more
story deflection than otherfloors, and with sorne most building
ideally you'd like to hove a fixed story deflection per floor. In
reality you always find that certain floors hove a little bit more
deflection. lf you did hove a perfect building, where ali the
story deflections were uniform. 1 would suspect yo u' d find the
optimum damping placement would be to put dampers on
every second or every third floor, although we hove seen
cases, in structures in the 30 to 35 story range, where it was
optimal to put dampers at about the 1Oth story and the 2oth
story and that seemed to give equal response.
The idea is not to try to put the dampers on every floor,
that' s a theoretically perfect solution but a very, very costly
one. See, we tend to use them in as few floors of the buildings
as you can physically get away with, without having to
increase the cost of adding them throughout. l've worked

47
with one professor at Berkekey and his idea was to hove
perhaps l 0,000 dampers in each building. lt was a nice idea
but the construction cost was just too expensive.

PREGUNTA:
Si el lng. Taylor nos pudiera comentar acerca de la
diferencia entre amortiguamiento o amortiguadores
histeréticos y amortiguadores fluidos.

RESPUESTA:
The biggest difference between fluid damping and
hysteretic damping is that hysteretic damping is always in
phase with the building stress, in other words, it' s a constant
force from the damper, so when your building is at maximum
deflection you still hove that constant hysteretic damping
force supply. lfyou attemptto use large amounts of damping
you will find that the stress becomes increased so greatly from
hysteretic damping that it is effectively limited to no more
than about 10% of critica!.
An additional problem with the hysteretic damper is
that it is attached to the structure with steel members. These
steel members hove an elasticity and until the hysteretic
device begins to deflect you are actually increasing the
stiffness of the structure, which, in the case of earthquakes,
hove a terrible habit of having the increased stiffness moving
into a portien of the spectra that will cause sorne rather
intense excitement of you building. The hysteretic device
eventually yields, but the damage has already been done,
the building has already started to respond to the higher
levels of the spectra.
With fluid damping its response is 180º out of tace with
the building stress, so there is no case where the addition of
fluid damping, up to the levels of perhaps 50% of critica!,
there is no case where it will actually increase any of your
building stresses. lt will always decrease the stress.
We ron a testwith a bridge structure comparing hysteretic
damping devices to the fluid damping devices and we
discovered that with hysteretic dampers in excess of 15%
critica!, above that leve! the building stresses begin to increase
greatly. Conversely the sorne structure was able to accept
fluid damping up to 60% of critica!, which, of course, radically
reduced the deflections in the structure. We can run to 60%
48
of critica! before we begin to see any increase in the building
stress.

PREGUNTA:
¿Qué tipo de amortiguamiento recomienda usted para
trenes elevados y para topes ciegos de fin de vía en ferroca-
rriles y en el metro.

RESPUESTA:
There were a series of experiments done at the University
of Buftalo in 1993 evaluating difterent types of bridge
construction techniques as to which type would be most
resistant to seismic events.
The design that appears to be most favorable uses
essentially heavy piers and floats the deck of the bridge
relative to those piers on isolation bearings. The bearings work
bestwhen they are damped and the optima! system consisted
of sorne spherical steel sliding bearings with fluid dampers. A
close second was the use of a Japanese rubber bearing also
included in the fluid dampers.
This particular task was funded by the Japanese, oddly
enough, and was, of course, pre the Kobe quake. What
surprised them was that 1heir analysis indicated that their
rubber bearings alone, on this bridge, would be suitable to
attenuate even the Japanese design level earthquakes.
When we actually tested, their desings were totally incapable
of accepting their design level earthquakes and, indeed, the
only bridge structure that passed the Japanese design leve!
test utilize the steel slider bearings of the fluid dampers. The
Japanese didn't like this because the steel sliding bearings
were built in the United Stotes and the fluid dampers were
built in the United States, but nonetheless that was the system
that performed the best.
1 am on the American Society of Civil Engineers
Committee that is evaluating the damage to bridges from
the Northridge earthquake and thus far it appears that the
design practice that we think has the most merit is, again, to
adapt the heavy pier construction with a flexible deck, using
enough damping in the system to prevent any hammering of
arrobotments or approaches orto overtravel the deck to get
any kind of overturning loads on the piers.

49
PREGUNTA:
Dr. Meli: ¿qué tipo de tecnología sería la apropiada
para zonas como Tlatelolco y la colonia Roma, principal-
mente la primera, donde los edificios son demasiado altos,
tienen gran peso y están en terreno blando y qué conse-
cuencias se podrían resentir en la ciudad de México en caso
de un terremoto de intensidad parecida a la del 85. Es decir
¿estamos ya mejor preparados para hacer frente a este tipo
de fenómeno?

RESPUESTA:
En mi comentario traté de contestar esta pregunta
sobre el tipo de dispositivos que pueden ser más adecuados
precisamente en esas condiciones. Las condiciones que se
dan en las zonas que usted menciona son de terreno blando
con movimientos muy lentos de período muy largo del suelo
y que en los edificios de cierta altura, como los que abundan
en esas dos áreas que usted menciona, son muy sensibles a
ellos y por eso en el gran número de refuerzos que se ha
hecho de edificios en esa zona, se ha seguido principalmen-
te el criterio de hacerlos muy rígidos para que tuvieran un
período de vibración mucho menor que el del suelo y, por lo
tanto, tuvieran desplazamientos pequeños, pero también
en algunos edificios se ha seguido el criterio diferente, que es
el de ponerles amortiguadores para hacer que no vibren
tanto, o sea, que no se amplifique su respuesta. Entonces, en
esa zona, dispositivos y técnicas como las que ha descrito el
Dr. Taylor son probablemente muy adecuadas.
Y en cuanto a la segunda parte de su pregunto, de qué
tan preparada puede estar la ciudad de México ante la
repetición de un sismo como el del 85, pues creo que los que
han seguido el desarrollo de la construcción y del refuerzo
de las estructuras podrán estar de acuerdo en que lo que
nosotros llamamos la vulnerabilidad de los edificios ha dismi-
nuido en forma notable por varias razones. Primera, porque
los edificios más débiles ya quedaron fuera del juego con el
sismo de 85; los que quedaron algo dañados han sido, en su
gran mayoría, reforzados, y aún muchos edificios que no
tuvieron daño pero tenían características que los hacían
poco confiables ante una repetición de un efecto como
éste han sido reforzados; hay cientos, miles de edificios en la

50
ciudad de México que han sido reforzados, por ejemplo, las
escuelas, los hospitales, aunque no hayan sufrido daño.
Y por otra parte, finalmente, las construcciones nuevas
se han hecho de acuerdo a un reglamento mucho más
rígido, mucho más estricto, que les da a los edificios una
capacidad superior. Por eso creo que podemos decir, con
bostante confianza, que en este momento la vulnerabilidad
de la ciudad es mucho menor de lo que era hace 1Oaños,
si nos desplazamos exactamente a hace 1Oaños, en enero
de 85, pues era mucho más vulnerable la ciudad a un sismo.
No quiere esto decir que si se repite un sismo como el del 85
no vaya a haber daño en la ciudad, pero creo que sí debe
ser mucho mayor ahora la seguridad de las construcciones,
de lo que era en aquel entonces.

PREGUNTA:
En los programas de análisis de edificios es necesario
proporcionar el amortiguomiento considerado en la estruc-
tura, y la pregunta es: ¿Es posible conocer éste (el
amortiguamiento) si sabemos el número de amortiguadores
que se van a usar en la estructura? Creo que es un poquito ... ,
aquí estamos hablando del huevo y la gallina, pero a ver si
puede comentar algo el Dr. Taylor.

RESPUESTA:
Yes, the normal approach is you run your analysis with
the leve! of damping that you keep increasing until you find
a place where your deflection and stresses stop reducing .
That would give you a global amount of damping, you'll
hove a certain amount of damping energy that you wish to
remove from the entire building, you then take that global
damping, look at your structure and ascertain where you
would like to put the dam:::>ers, justas the first approximation.
You then take the total amount of damping energy you hove
to hove, divide that by the number of dampers and that tells
you how big a damper you need.
Given a basic series of calculations, the work normally
can be done in a matter of one or two hours, to ascertain at
leost a first solution . Then as you get further in usually one or
two other successive alterations will be required to come up
with the absolute optima: placement.

51
 We're doing work on a tall building right now and we
took two initial runs, just with hand calculations, to see what
level of damping the building light. In other words, a n amount
of damping that significantly reduced the deflection and
stress and enabled the engineer to hove a design that was
acceptable, it' sbasic design was overstressed and we picked
a level of about 15% of critica!, which, for this building, was
perfectly acceptable. We then just calculated what the
damping constant C was to hove 15% of critical. The engineer
had already determined that there were approximately 16
places or levels in this building, where he wanted to hove
damping, so we took the total damping constant, divided it
by 16 dampers, that carne up with the damping constant per
damper and, again, it was justa matter of a couple of hours,
so it' s a very quick solution, but the first thing you hove to do
is hove a rough design of your building and then you hove to
increase the damping level in your study, or your analysis,
until such time as the deflection and stresses stop reducing,
and that will be your first place to call at. Or if you hove a
building that's overstressed because your first cut design is
not acceptable, then just keep increasing the damping level
until it becomes acceptable.
lnitially it sounds hard to do, but after you've gone
through two or three structures there is a very definite flow of
the c alculations that makes it quite simple.

PREGUNTA:
Para el Dr. Meli, es urgente establecer cursos de diseño
y a plicación para trabajar con los disipadores de energía y
¿es el CENAPRE el lugar adecuado?

RESPUESTA:
Bueno, creo que hay muchos lugares donde podrían
darse, me parece que es una buena idea. Hubo un semina-
rio hace unos tres años, que organizó la Sociedad Mexicana
de Ingeniería Sísmica, sobre el uso no sólo de amortiguado-
res, sino de aisladores.
El año pasado el ingeniero Enrique Martínez y yo inten-
tamos organizar un curso de este tipo pero por distintas
razones, se frustró y creo que es un buen punto de partida
esta conferencia para reiniciar esos esfuerzos.

52
PREGUNTA:
Tal vez con ayuda de los ingenieros mexicanos pueda
darnos el Dr. Taylor un ejemplo del costo de este dispositivo
en la ciudad de México. No sé si él quiera comentar algo,
pues es la primera vez que nos visita .

RESPUESTA:
1would say only that we're very open to working with
any of the engineers in Mexico to test or evaluate the
application of these devices to your buildings and we offer
this the sorne way that we've worked for the last 4 or 5 years
with engineering firms in the United States, ali the way from
Southern California up to Washington States, but it is to the
point now where 1know this summer there' s lectures of series
been given at Cal Tech by Prof. José Anaudy, whom 1belive
is from Spain, who is a professor now at Berkeley and he is
giving three lectures of series on the application of damping
devices into structures and 1 understand ali three of the
lectures series this summer hove already been sold out so this
is definitely an orea where great interest is being shown by
the engineering community and, again, I'm only too happy
to work with any of the engineering firms here to work on any
potential applications.

COMENTARIO
DR. ROBERTO MELI PIRALLA
Una observación en cuanto al costo. Cuando se pien-
se, o cuando se quiera evaluar el costo de una solución de
este tipo, no hay que irse con la idea simplista de que es sólo
el costo de los amortiguadores, de los dispositivos, sino que
debe tomarse en cuenta el costo de las interfaces, de los
elementos que se tienen que colocar en la estructura para
poder anclar estos amortiguadores y ese costo puede ser,
en algunos casos, del mismo orden o aún mayor que el de
los propios dispositivos, sobre todo si hablamos de su aplica-
ción en una estructura existente, en que hay que eliminar
elementos no estructurales, recubrimientos y después el
artclaje, la conexión de esto con la estructura puede ser
mucho más complicada y costosa de lo que se piensa a
primera vista.

53
 Sin embargo creo que, comparada con otras solucio-
nes, sigue teniendo atractivos muy importantes aún del
punto de vista económico.

54
La Academia Mexicana de Ingeniería, A.C.,
con el patrocinio del Consejo Nacional de Cien-
cia y Tecnología, editó el presente Fascículo,
constando la edición de 850 ejemplares.

La tipografía estuvo a cargo de Norma Kobeh

González (Diticom) y la impresión de
Promagráfica Mexicana, S.A. de C. V., habién-
dose terminado la impresión el día 31 de julio
de 1995.