To investigate the post-fire seismic behaviour of reinforced concrete (RC) frames with different columnto-beam bending capacity ratios, four specimens were fabricated, which included a strong-beam-weakcolumn frame and a strong-column-weak-beam frame either under room temperature or after being exposed to fire. The fire test was conducted in a furnace chamber, followed by quasi-static tests under a low-frequency cyclic load. The crack patterns, hysteretic loops, plastic hinges, and failure modes were investigated in the loading process. The influence of two factors, i.e., the fire exposure and the columnto-beam bending capacity ratio, on the mechanical performance, ductility, stiffness degradation, and energy dissipation was compared and analysed. The experimental results indicated that the ultimate bearing capacity, the stiffness, the ductility factor, and the energy dissipation capacity of the RC frames decreased after fire exposure. The bearing capacity of the strong-beam-weak-column frame decreased even more seriously. Although the yielding displacements of the post-fire frames increased, their ultimate displacements decreased. In addition, the strong-column-weak-beam frame under room temperature failed in the form of beam-end plastic hinging, while after being exposed to fire, the failure mode changed to shear-bond failure in column.

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Various shape memory alloy (SMA) dampers have been developed to reduce structural vibration responses. However, the application of SMA dampers has been restricted by the high material costs of SMAs. Therefore, this study developed and tested an innovative SMA damping inerter (SDI) in which an SMA element and an inerter element were arranged in parallel and deployed in series with a supporting spring element. A single-degree-of-freedom structure with an SDI was employed to analyze the effect of vibration mitigation. A theoretical analysis was conducted via an equivalent linearization method, and parameter studies were then used to evaluate the performance of the SDI-fitted structure from perspectives of structural displacement, acceleration, and energy dissipation as well as the most efficient frequency tuning bandwidth. The performances of the SDI and a conventional SMA damper were compared by using a timedomain analysis with recorded and simulated ground motions, revealing clearly superior results for the SDI with respect to structural response mitigation, and seismic energy dissipation. The system proposed here took advantage of the full potential of combining SMA and inerter elements, making the SDI a robust system for mitigating structural vibration with more economical SMA material costs.

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