Response of piping system on friction support to bi-directional excitation

Installation of friction devices between a piping system and its supporting medium is an effective way of energy dissipation in the piping systems. In this paper, seismic effectiveness of friction type support for a piping system subjected to two horizontal components of earthquake motion is investigated. The interaction between the mobilized restoring forces of the friction support is duly considered. The non-linear behavior of the restoring forces of the support is modeled as an elastic-perfectly plastic system with a very high value of initial stiffness. Such an idealization avoids keeping track of transitional rules (as required in conventional modeling of friction systems) under arbitrary dynamic loading. The frictional forces mobilized at the friction support are assumed to be dependent on the sliding velocity and instantaneous normal force acting on the support. A detailed systematic procedure for analysis of piping systems supported on friction support considering the effects of bi-directional interaction of the frictional forces is presented. The proposed procedure is validated by comparing the analytical seismic responses of a spatial piping system supported on a friction support with the corresponding experimental results. The responses of the piping system and the frictional forces of the support are observed to be in close agreement with the experimental results validating the proposed analysis procedure. It was also observed that the friction supports are very effective in reducing the seismic response of piping systems. In order to investigate the effects of bi-directional interaction of the frictional forces, the seismic responses of the piping system are compared by considering and ignoring the interaction under few narrow-band and broad-band (real earthquake) ground motions. The bi-directional interaction of the frictional forces has significant effects on the response of piping system and should be included in the analysis of piping systems supported on friction supports. Further, it was also observed that the velocity dependence of the friction coefficient does not have noticeable effects on the peak responses of the piping system.