• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.603-623
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• 2015

The scale and nature of the recent earthquakes in the world and the related earthquake disaster index coerce the concerned community to become anxious about it. Therefore, it is crucial that seismic lateral load effect will be appropriately considered in structural design. Application of seismic isolation system stands as a consistent alternative against this hazard. The objective of the study is to evaluate the structural and economic feasibility of reinforced concrete (RC) buildings with base isolation located in medium risk seismic region. Linear and nonlinear dynamic analyses as well as linear static analysis under site-specific bi-directional seismic excitation have been carried out for both fixed based (FB) and base isolated (BI) buildings in the present study. The superstructure and base of buildings are modeled in a 3D finite element model by consistent mass approach having six degrees of freedom at each node. The floor slabs are simulated as rigid diaphragms. Lead rubber bearing (LRB) and High damping rubber bearing (HDRB) are used as isolation device. Change of structural behaviors and savings in construction costing are evaluated. The study shows that for low to medium rise buildings, isolators can reduce muscular amount of base shears, base moments and floor accelerations for building at soft to medium stiff soil. Allowable higher horizontal displacement induces structural flexibility. Though incorporating isolator increases the outlay, overall structural cost may be reduced. The application of base isolation system confirms a potential to be used as a viable solution in economic building design.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.383-397
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• 2018

Traditional base isolation systems focus on isolating the seismic response of a structure in the horizontal direction. However, in regions where the vertical earthquake excitation is significant (such as near-fault region), a traditional base-isolated building exhibits a significant vertical vibration. To eliminate this shortcoming, a rocking-isolated system named Telescopic Column (TC) is proposed in this paper. Detailed rocking and isolation mechanism of the TC system is presented. The seismic performance of the TC is compared with the traditional elastomeric bearing (EB) and friction pendulum (FP) base-isolated systems. A 4-storey reinforced concrete moment-resisting frame (RC-MRF) is selected as the reference superstructure. The seismic response of the reference superstructure in terms of column axial forces, base shears, floor accelerations, inter-storey drift ratios (IDR) and collapse margin ratios (CMRs) are evaluated using OpenSees. The results of the nonlinear dynamic analysis subjected to multi-directional earthquake excitations show that the superstructure equipped with the newly proposed TC is more resilient and exhibits a superior response with higher margin of safety against collapse when compared with the same superstructure with the traditional base-isolation (BI) system.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.83 no.5
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• pp.627-644
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• 2022

In past major earthquakes (1994 Northridge, 1995 Kobe, Chi-Chi 1999, Kocaeli 1999), significant damages occurred in the liquid storage tanks. The basic failure patterns were observed to be the buckling of the tank wall and uplift of the anchorage system. The damages in the industrial facilities and nuclear power plants have caused the spread of toxic substances to the environment and significant fires. Seismic isolation can be used in liquid storage tanks to decouple the structure and decrease the structural demand in the superstructure in case of ground shaking. Previous studies on the use of seismic isolation systems on liquid storage tanks show that an isolation system reduces the impulsive response but might slightly increase the convective one. There is still a lack of understanding of the seismic response of seismically isolated liquid storage tanks considering the fluid-structure interaction. In this study, one broad tank, one medium tank, and one slender tank are selected and designed. Two- and three-dimensional elastomeric bearings are used as seismic isolation systems. The seismic performance of the tanks is then investigated through nonlinear dynamic time-history analyses. The effectiveness of each seismic isolation system on tanks' performance was investigated. Isolator tension forces, modal analysis results, hydrodynamic stresses, strains, sloshing heights and base shear forces of the tanks are compared. The results show that the total base shear is lower in 3D-isolators compared to 2D-isolators. Even though the tank wall stresses, and strains are slightly higher in 3D-isolators, they are more efficient to prevent the tension problem.

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.21 no.5
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• pp.495-504
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• 2018

The possibility of earthquakes in vulnerable regions indicates that efficient technique is required for seismic protection of buildings. During the recent decades, the concept is moving towards the insertion of base isolation on seismic prone buildings. So, investigation of structural behavior is a burning topic for buildings to be isolated in base level by bearing device. This study deals with the incorporation of base isolation system and focuses the changes of structural responses for different types of Lead Rubber Bearing (LRB) isolators. A number of sixteen model buildings have been simulated selecting twelve types of bearing systems as well as conventional fixed-base (FB) scheme. The superstructures of the high-rise buildings are represented by finite element assemblage adopting multi-degree of freedoms. Static and dynamic analyses are carried out for FB and base isolated (BI) buildings. The dynamic analysis in finite element package has been performed by the nonlinear time history analysis (THA) based on the site-specific seismic excitation and compared employing eminent earthquakes. The influence of the model type and the alteration in superstructure behavior of the isolated buildings have been duly assessed. The results of the 3D multistory structures show that the lateral forces, displacement, inertia and story accelerations of the superstructure of the seismic prone buildings are significantly reduced due to bearing insertion. The nonlinear dynamic analysis shows 12 to 40% lessening in base shear when LRB is incorporated leading to substantial allowance of horizontal displacement. It is revealed that the LRB isolators might be potential options to diminish the respective floor accelerations, inertia, displacements and base shear whatever the condition coincides. The isolators with lower force intercept but higher isolation period is found to be better for decreasing base shear, floor acceleration and inertia force leading to reduction of structural and non-structural damage. However, LRB with lower isolator period seems to be more effective in dropping displacement at bearing interface aimed at reducing horizontal shift of building structure.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.1-13
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• 2010

This paper proposes an optimal design method for the nonlinear seismic isolated bridge. The probabilities of failure at the pier and the seismic isolator are considered as objective functions for optimal design, and a multi-objective optimization technique is employed to efficiently explore a set of multiple solutions optimizing mutually-conflicting objective functions at the same time. In addition, a stochastic linearization method is incorporated into the multi-objective optimization framework in order to effectively estimate the stochastic responses of the bridge without performing numerous nonlinear time history analyses during the optimization process. As a numerical example to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method, the Nam-Han river bridge is taken into account, and the proposed method and the existing life-cycle-cost based design method are both applied for the purpose of comparing their seismic performances. The comparative results demonstrate that the proposed method not only shows better seismic performance but also is more economical than the existing cost-based design method. The proposed method is also proven to guarantee improved performance under variations in seismic intensity, in bandwidth and in the predominant frequency of the seismic event.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Technology of Plasticity Conference
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• 1999.03b
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• pp.229-232
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• 1999

The seismic isolation technology has appeared to be increasingly necessary for highway brides LNG tank nuclear power plant and building structures in view of recent frequent earthquake vibrations in Korea. Also high-technology industries required effective seismic protection. The LRB(Lead Rubber Bearing) systen has been counted as the most effective way for seismic isolation which is now under development and widely used in industries. Hear the commercial FEM software for nonlinear analysis MARC has provided force-displacement curves on the rubber system. The analysis has been carried out about four cases ; 29.5mm and 59mm horizontal dislacements with/without a center hole. The unknown constants of the strain energy function of Ogden model have been obtained by a tension test,

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.381-399
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• 2005

Base isolation technologies have been proven to be very efficient in protecting structures from seismic hazards during experimental and theoretical studies. In recent years, there have been more and more engineering applications using base isolators to upgrade the seismic resistibility of structures. Optimum design of the base isolator can lessen the undesirable seismic hazard with the most efficiency. Hence, tracing the nonlinear behavior of the base isolator with good accuracy is important in the engineering profession. In order to predict the nonlinear behavior of base isolated structures precisely, hundreds even thousands of degrees-of-freedom and iterative algorithm are required for nonlinear time history analysis. In view of this, a simple and feasible exact formulation without any iteration has been proposed in this study to calculate the seismic responses of structures with base isolators. Comparison between the experimental results from shaking table tests conducted at National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering in Taiwan and the analytical results show that the proposed method can accurately simulate the seismic behavior of base isolated structures with elastomeric bearings. Furthermore, it is also shown that the proposed method can predict the nonlinear behavior of the VCFPS isolated structure with accuracy as compared to that from the nonlinear finite element program. Therefore, the proposed concept can be used as a simple and practical tool for engineering professions for designing the elastomeric bearing as well as sliding bearing.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.25 no.11
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• pp.1743-1750
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• 2001

This paper presents an analysis of nonlinear response of the seismically isolated structure against earthquake excitation to evaluate isolation performances of a rubber bearing. In the analysis of the vibration of building, the building is modeled by lumped mass system where the restoring force is considered as linear, bilinear and trilinear. Fundamental equations of motion are derived for the base isolated structure, and hysteretic and nonlinear-elastic characteristics are considered for a numerical calculation. The excitation levels are magnified fur the recorded strong earthquake motions in order to examine dynamic stability of the structure. Seismic responses (of the building are compared fur the each restoring force type. As a result, it is shown that the effect of the motion by the nonlinear response of the building is comparatively not so large from a seismic design standpoint. The responses of the isolated structures reduce sufficiently and controled the motion of the building well in a practical range. By increasing the acceleration of the earthquake, the yielding of the farce was occurred in the concrete and steel frame, which shows the necessity of the exact nonlinear dynamic analysis.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.10 no.6
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• pp.1451-1465
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• 2016

The effectiveness of base isolation (BI) systems for mitigation of seismic vibration of bridges have been extensively studied in the past. It is well established in those studies that the performance of BI system is largely dependent on the characteristics of isolator yield strength. For optimum design of such systems, normally a standard nonlinear optimization problem is formulated to minimize the maximum response of the structure, referred as Stochastic Structural Optimization (SSO). The SSO of BI system is usually performed with reference to a problem of unconstrained optimization without imposing any restriction on the maximum isolator displacement. In this regard it is important to note that the isolator displacement should not be arbitrarily large to fulfil the serviceability requirements and to avoid the possibility of pounding to the adjacent units. The present study is intended to incorporate the effect of excessive isolator displacement in optimizing BI system to control seismic vibration effect of bridges. In doing so, the necessary stochastic response of the isolated bridge needs to be optimized is obtained in the framework of statistical linearization of the related nonlinear random vibration problem. A simply supported bridge is taken up to elucidate the effect of constraint condition on optimum design and overall performance of the isolated bridge compared to that of obtained by the conventional unconstrained optimization approach.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.63-69
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• 1998

A rotating shaft system subjected to seismic motions has been investigated for the various operating modes at start-up. During an earthquake excitation, the rotor may hit the stator of machines due to the excessive deformation of shaft, and thus the response of rotating shaft system of which foundation is supported by the vibration isolation devices has been simulated. In order to examine the transient response of the rotating shaft system at the start-up to both the various operating conditions and the seismic excitation simultaneously, nonlinear equations of motion are derived and solved numerically using Runge-Kutta method. The response of the rotating shaft system is calculated according to the operating modes as recommended by the machine and the system parameters such as the spring stiffness of isolation devices.