Numerical artifacts associated with Rayleigh and modal damping models of inelastic structures with massless coordinates

The paper presents a detailed reexamination of the effects of three damping models on the inelastic seismic response of structures with massless degrees of freedom. The models considered correspond to (a) Rayleigh damping based on current properties (tangent stiffness), (b) Rayleigh damping based on initial properties, and (c) modal damping. The results suggest that some nonzero damping forces/moments at massless DOFs obtained in multistory frames for the case of Rayleigh damping with tangent stiffness may be numerical artifacts rather than a deficiency of the damping model. The results also indicate that significant artificial numerical oscillations in the velocities of the secondary components of MDOF structures are introduced when modal damping or mass-proportional damping is used.