There is divergent phenomenon existing in time-domain calculation results based on complex damping model. Hysteretic damping model has the shortcomings that energy dissipation is not consistent with the practical case and a defect of nonlinearity in linear elastic stage. To overcome the above shortcomings of complex damping model and hysteretic damping model, a frequency dependent viscous damping model is obtained based on the principles of frequency domain transformation in this paper. For the realization of structural time-history calculation method, an improved frequency dependent viscous damping model is obtained based on the assumption of the relationship between acceleration and displacement. The improved frequency dependent viscous damping model has the advantage that energy consumption is independent of external excitation frequencies. At the same time, the energy consumption in the proposed model is consistent with the practical case, and it maintains linear characteristic of single-degree-of-freedom structure with a single vibration frequency. It is assumed that structural response is harmonic vibration response in every time step. It contains the single frequency. By introducing the constant average acceleration method, a time-history calculation method of single degree of freedom system can be put forward. On this basis, combined with the modal superposition method, the time-history calculation formulas of multi-degree of freedom system are obtained. The analysis results of the cases show that improved frequency viscous damping model can overcome the shortcoming of the frequency-domain method based on complex damping model. It can also avoid the divergent phenomenon in calculation results of time-domain method based on the complex damping model.