Building Passive Control in Japan

The present paper describes three key issues as follows: (1) A major research program on passive control of buildings: Shaking table tests using E-Defense will be conducted in February 2009, for a full-scale 5-story steel building with or without dampers. (2) Code and specifications: Japanese code requires nonlinear time history analysis for buildings with dampers, or energy-based analysis when using steel dampers. Unlike the code rules leading to iterative design, JSSI specifications give a direct design method (DDM) for any target performance set by designers or clients. (3) Damage-Free Design: Under the government support, a large team of researchers/designers has developed a damage-free design method using dampers and frames of the so-called “super high strength steel”. The method is an extended version of the DDM, and its inclusion in the future code is being investigated.