Seismosoft | Earthquake Engineering Solutions

Dear Seismosoft Support:
I am doing some investigation about viscous damper using Seismostrut. A shaking table test, which is a three-storey RC frame with one bay in the x-direction and two bays in the y-direction, have been simulated successfully by me. And then I tried to add viscous damper using a Maxwell model into the RC frame. Unfortunately, I found that the damping element in Seismostrut have no effect.
I have built two models, one of which the viscous damper is series coupling of damping element and elastic frame element with large stiffness, another one is that the damping element is taken out and just an elastic frame element which is the same as the former is connected with the frame. Then a dynamic analysis was carried out and the results of two model is the same. If you need, I can send these models to you. Not only the time history of roof displacement of two models, but also there is no damping force found in damping element.
I have check my model many times and have no idea what is goning wrong. So I hope that you could give me some suggestions for this problem.
Thank you very much!

Dear Seismosoft Support:
I must apologize for my mistakes and lead to viscous damper doesn't work. When I corrected , the displacement of roof was obviously decreased.

In any case, your model is still erroneous, since you are using a dashpot element, which by definition is connected to the ground, as explicitly indicated in the Help System.

If you wish to model a viscous damper placed between different structural elements, you should instead use a link element with an appropriate response curve.

Seismosoft Support