Summary This paper investigates the dynamic response of an elastic single‐degree‐of‐freedom oscillator coupled with a rocking wall. Both configurations of a stepping rocking wall and a pinned rocking wall that have been reported in the literature are examined. The full nonlinear equations of motions are derived, and the paper shows through a comprehensive parametric analysis that the coupling with a rocking wall has mixed results on suppressing the dynamic response of the elastic oscillator. The stepping rocking wall is most effective in suppressing displacements of relative flexible structures with a heavier wall being most effective. In contrast, the pinned wall amplifies the displacements along a wide range of the spectrum with a heavier wall being most detrimental. This happens partly because in a pinned wall the moment from its weight works against stability. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Summary This paper investigates the inelastic response of a yielding structure coupled with a vertically restrained rocking wall. The paper first derives the nonlinear equations of motion of a yielding oscillator coupled with a vertically restrained rocking wall, and the dependability of the one‐degree of freedom idealization is validated against the nonlinear time‐history response analysis of a well‐known nine‐story moment‐resisting steel frame that is coupled with a stepping, vertically restrained rocking wall. While, the coupling of weak building frames with rocking walls is an efficient strategy that controls inelastic deformations by enforcing a uniform interstory‐drift distribution, therefore, avoiding mid‐story failures, the paper shows that even for medium‐rise buildings the effect of vertical tendons on the inelastic structural response is marginal, with the exception of increasing the vertical reactions at the pivoting points of the rocking wall. Accordingly, the paper concludes that for medium‐rise to high‐rise buildings, vertical tendons in rocking walls are not beneficial.

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A comparative analysis of two bridges constructed with the most commonly used girder types in Florida is carried out. The girder types that the bridges are employed for this study are AASHTO Type III (American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials) and Florida I-Beam. Two bridges that have exactly the same specifications but with different girder type are analyzed under baseline state and different prestress loss cases. Finite element models of these bridges are utilized and the FE models are subjected to two types of virtual load tests of Florida legal loads namely C5 and SU4. Florida I-Beam tends to have higher load carrying capacity, higher lateral stiffness, cost efficiency and better element level reliability when compared to AASHTO Type girders.

Given that the coupling of a framing structure to a strong, rocking wall enforces a first-mode response, this paper investigates the dynamic response of a yielding single-degree-of-freedom oscillator coupled to a stepping rocking wall with supplemental damping (either hysteretic or linear viscous) along its sides. The full nonlinear equations of motion are derived, and the study presents an earthquake response analysis in terms of inelastic spectra. The study shows that for structures with preyielding period 1 < 1.0 s, the effect of supplemental damping along the sides of the rocking wall is marginal even when large values of damping are used. The study uncovers that occasionally, the damped response matches or exceeds the undamped response; however, when this happens, the exceedance is marginal. The paper concludes that for yielding structures with strength less than 10% of their weight, the use of supplemental damping along the sides of a rocking wall coupled to a yielding structure is not recommended. The paper shows that supplemental damping along the sides of the rocking wall may have some limited beneficial effects for structures with longer preyielding periods (say 1 > 1.0 s). Nevertheless, no notable further response reduction is observed when larger values of hysteretic or viscous damping are used.