Seismic Rehabilitation of an Historic Structure

Hi! I'm Kit Miyamoto of Marr Shaffer & Miyamoto Structural Engineers of Sacramento, California.

I'd like to show you how I implemented a seismic retrofit of an historic hotel, using Fluid Viscous dampers.

This is the building, the Hotel Woodland in Woodland California....

As you can see, this is an historic structure, and the owner wished to minimize changes to the building's appearance.

Because this building has a relatively soft first story, the retrofit involved adding dampers in chevron bracing elements in a steel sub-frame. A total of 16 dampers were used, each with 100,000 lb. output force.