Abstract: A series of incremental dynamic analysis (IDA) were conducted on 6-storey 3-bay steel frames subjected to selected near-fault pulse-type ground motions. The frames are installed with tuned viscous mass dampers (TVMDs), viscous dampers (VDs) or no dampers, respectively. The seismic fragility curves corresponding to different damage states were obtained based on IDA results. The comparison of the seismic fragility of structures between TVMDs and VDs shows that the reliabilities of the main structure against different damage states are improved significantly with the addition of inerter element. Given the same damping ratio, the structure with TVMDs exhibits excellent improvement in seismic resistant capacity and low damage failure probability of the main structure against different damage states. With the increase of mass ratio, the improvement in structural performance due to TVMD does not decrease with the increase of nonlinearity. And the seismic mitigation effect of the structure is stable during the whole process including elasticity, elastic-plasticity and collapse. Furthermore, three sets of near-fault ground motion records with different pulse periods were selected for time history analysis, and the seismic mitigation effect of TVMD under near-fault pulse-type ground motions was discussed. The results show that under the near-fault pulse-type ground motions, TVMD does not always achieve the damping enhancement of the damping element, and the performance of the damper is related to the characteristics of ground motions. Compared with the enhanced structure with VDs and the original benchmark model, TVMD system reduces the input energy of the main structure when T_1 / T_\textp \geqslant 2 . However, it has lower capacity of energy dissipation and the effect of damping enhancement could not be realized. When T_1 / T_\textp < 2 , TVMD can significantly reduce the seismic response and the residual displacement of the structure. It enhances the capacity of energy dissipation of the structure as well as reduces the input energy of the main structure. This reflects the damping enhancement effect of the inerter.