Evaluation of the effects of insertion of viscous dampers in Moment Resisting Frames

This research work faces the problem of insertion of viscous dampers into Moment Resisiting Frames (MRF) for maximum efficiency in mitigation of the seismic effects. The work would lead to a precise design indication. The fundamental result of the thesis consists in showing that, even for moment-resisting structures, you can design a system of added viscous dampers able to achieve target levels of performances. Ie given the reduction factor in the seismic response, discover the characteristics of the viscous dampers which allow to achieve it.

Local Trigonometric Methods for Time Series Smoothing.

The thesis is concerned with local trigonometric regression methods. The aim was to develop a method for extraction of cyclical components in time series. The main results of the thesis are the following. First, a generalization of the filter proposed by Christiano and Fitzgerald is furnished for the smoothing of ARIMA(p,d,q) process. Second, a local trigonometric filter is built, with its statistical properties. Third, they are discussed the convergence properties of trigonometric estimators, and the problem of choosing the order of the model. A large scale simulation experiment has been designed in order to assess the performance of the proposed models and methods. The results show that local trigonometric regression may be a useful tool for periodic time series analysis.