Testing an Open-Space Damping System

The open-space damping system has been developed to preserve open space within the frame of its installation. An earlier paper by the authors described its function, presented a theory to describe its behavior, and presented computational models to verify the theory. This paper describes an experimental study of a large-scale model with the open-space damping system that is used to acquire data for validating the developed analytical and computational models. Testing consisted of (1) a single portal frame tested under imposed lateral motion, and (2) a single story 146 kN model tested on an earthquake simulator under seismic excitation. Two different configurations of the open-space system (plus a third variant of one of the two) in three different structural system configurations were tested. The tests demonstrate the increase in damping provided by the damping system. Comparisons of experimental results (in terms of structural drift, floor accelerations, and force-displacement loops) to results obtained by computational tools demonstrate the validity of the computational model.