Buckling Restrained Brace (BRB) is a novel energy dissipation device that was developed in the 1980s. Past experimental investigations were performed by using deformation-related parameters such as drift and ductility-based loading history to evaluate the performance of the BRBs. The outcome of the performance evaluation of the BRBs was based on either the ability of the BRBs against the fracture or its ability to sustain axial deformation, as opposed to evaluating the energy demand of the BRBs

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... during earthquake excitation. A novel approach was proposed to explicitly quantify the energy demand of the BRBs during earthquakes. First, an equation was proposed to determine energy demand from the site-specific design spectrum. After that, floor-wise energy distribution was proposed based on empirical equations. Finally, equations to obtain rise time for the energy demand for the BRB were proposed. Engineers can use the equations to quantify the energy demand for BRBs at different floors at different site locations. The empirical equations were obtained by studying a range of single-degree-of-freedom systems and a series of prototype buildings with 3, 6 and 8 storeys. The proposed equations were used to quantify the seismic demand of the BRBs in a 5-storey configuration. The results show that the energy demand obtained by applying the proposed method is similar to the median demand obtained from the time history analysis. The results show that the proposed procedure is effective and efficient for quantifying the energy demand for buildings with BRBs.