Equivalent viscous damping for modeling inelastic impacts in earthquake pounding problems

In studies of earthquake‐induced pounding between adjacent structures, spring–dashpot elements are often used to simulate the impacts. In this brief paper an equation is derived expressing the dashpot constant as a function of the coefficient of restitution, in terms of which inelastic impacts of colliding simple bodies have usually been described. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.