1st Croatian Conference on Earthquake Engineering 1CroCEE 2021

This paper summarizes the experimental campaign carried out for the development of a new steel energy dissipative device named Slit Dampers (SDs) designed for earthquake protection of structures. SDs consist in shear steel plates with appropriately shaped cut-out portions of material for allowing the maximum spread of plastic deformation along the device and then maximizing the hysteretic dissipative behavior. A total of eighty-two steel shear plates with different openings and thicknesses are tested to investigate their behavior under cyclic pseudo-static loading. Six types of steel shear plates are studied, including the SD with narrow slits that divide the plate into rectangular links, and the butterfly fuse with a diamond-shaped opening that creates butterfly shape links in the plate. Other varying test parameters are loading rate, material strength, and the number of in-parallel damper elements. It is expected that the proposed model can be successfully used to predict the behavior of dampers in real-world applications.