Intelligent seismic isolation system using air bearings and earthquake early warning

Recently strong seismic waves or long period seismic waves have been observed in various earthquakes that occurred in Japan. As a result improvements of existing seismic isolation systems are deemed necessary. The present study proposed an intelligent seismic isolation system encompassing air bearings and earthquake early warning (EEW) system. Such system exhibits adequate isolation performance. The air bearings are isolation device that may render infinite the superstructure natural period by floating them, and the EEW is applied for a trigger of isolation. This paper illustrates the proposed system and discusses the experimental results of a test carried out with the system. Laboratory tests carried out in the present research demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed base isolated systems and prove its efficacy in mitigating the effects of three-dimensional seismic waves. For example, the system suppressed the horizontal response acceleration of an isolation target to 38% of input acceleration.     

Seismic isolation: Early history

Seismic isolation or “aseismic base isolation” is an earthquake protection strategy that aims to uncouple the motion of a structure from the ground shaking and thereby reduce structural forces. A most effective and successful seismic protection technology, seismic isolation, is by now a mature and viable alternative to traditional capacity design and has been implemented in numerous bridges, buildings, and other special structures worldwide. This paper records the origins and early developments (up to the early 1990s) of seismic isolation.     

Component and shaking table tests for full‐scale multiple friction pendulum system

The use of base isolation in developed countries including the U.S. and Japan has already been recognized as a very effective method for upgrading the seismic resistance of structures. In this study, an advanced base‐isolation system called the multiple friction pendulum system (MFPS) is investigated to understand its performance on seismic mitigation through full‐scale component and shaking table tests. The component tests of the advanced Teflon composite coated on the sliding surface show that the friction coefficient of the lubricant material is a function of the sliding velocity in the range of 0.03–0.12. The experimental results also indicate that there were no signs of degradation of the sliding interface observed after 2000 cycles of sliding displacements. A full‐scale MFPS isolator under a vertically compressive load of 8830 KN (900 tf) and horizontally cyclic displacements was tested in order to assess the feasibility of the MFPS isolator for its practical use. After 248 cycles of horizontal displacement reversals, the behaviour of the base isolator was almost identical to its behaviour during the first few cycles. The experimental results of the shaking table tests of a full‐scale steel structure isolated with MFPS isolators show that the MFPS device can isolate seismic transmitted energy effectively under soft‐soil‐deposit site earthquakes with long predominant periods as well as strong ground motions with short predominant periods. These test results demonstrate that the MFPS isolator possesses excellent durability and outstanding earthquake‐proof capability. Furthermore, the numerical results show that the mathematical model proposed in this study can well predict the seismic responses of a structure isolated with MFPS isolators. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

基于自由振动响应的基础隔震建筑减震能力评估方法研究

目前国内外已修建完成了大量隔震建筑,但仅有少量经受了地震检验,绝大部分隔震结构减震能力能否达到设计目标尚存疑问.本文针对基础隔震建筑,提出了一种基于自由振动响应的减震能力评估方法.首先,对隔震建筑进行多级幅值初位移自由振动原位试验,获取结构的抗震能力曲线;其次,根据地震反应谱建立地震需求曲面,进而确定隔震结构性能点;最...     

核电站结构隔震研究进展

基底隔震已经大量应用于一般民用建筑中,被认为是在剧烈地震中保护建筑物最具发展前景的技术之一,但对于核电站这类特殊的建筑物应用较少,且研究比较薄弱。介绍了核电站水平及三维隔震装置的研发及性能测试,概述了核电站隔震系统抗震性能的研究进展和核电站隔震设计规范,指出了在核电站中应用隔震技术还有待解决的问题,对今后核电站隔震的研究提出了一些建议。     

组合基础隔震在建筑工程中的应用

隔震作为一种新的抗震技术,已广泛应用于新建和加固的建筑工程,同时,许多新型式的支座得到了开发和应用。组合基础隔震是一种新的隔震设计思想,能充分应用不同类型隔震支座的特性,有效降低上部结构地震反应。本文介绍了组合基础隔震在某一工程中的应用,工程中使用的支座包括普通橡胶隔震支座、铅芯橡胶隔震支座和弹性滑板支座三种类型,对全部使用支座进行了常规检测,结构计算采用等效线性法、能量包络法和时程反应分析等方法,计算结果表明:组合基础隔震能有效降低上部结构的反应,隔震层的变形控制在安全范围之内。     

Real‐time hybrid testing of a smart base isolation system

Real‐time hybrid testing is a very effective technique for evaluating the dynamic responses of rate‐dependent structural systems subjected to earthquake excitation. A smart base isolation system has been proposed by others using conventional low‐damping isolators and controllable damping devices such as magnetorheological (MR) dampers to achieve specified control target performance. In this paper, real‐time hybrid tests of a smart base isolation system are conducted. The simulation is for a base‐isolated two‐degrees‐of‐freedom building model where the superstructure and the low‐damping base isolator are numerically simulated, and the MR damper is physically tested. The target displacement obtained from the step‐by‐step integration of the numerical substructure is imposed on the MR damper, which is driven by three different control algorithms in real‐time. To compensate the actuator delay and improve the accuracy of the test, an adaptive phase‐lead compensator is implemented. The accuracy of each test is investigated by using the root mean square error and the tracking indicator. Experimental results demonstrate that the hybrid testing procedure using the proposed actuator compensation techniques is effective for investigating the control performance of the MR damper in a smart base isolation system. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Shaking‐table tests on reinforced concrete frames with different isolation systems

The effectiveness of seismic isolation in protecting structural and non‐structural elements from damage has been assessed in an extensive programme of shaking‐table tests, carried out on four identical 1/3.3‐scale, two‐dimensional, reinforced concrete (R/C) frames. Four different isolation systems were considered, namely: (i) rubber‐based, (ii) steel‐based, (iii) shape memory alloy (SMA)‐based and (iv) hybrid, i.e. based on both SMA and steel components, isolation systems. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of the main results of the experimental tests on base‐isolated models, whose structural response is described through: (i) maximum base displacements; (ii) maximum interstorey drifts; (iii) maximum storey accelerations and (iv) maximum storey shear forces. The evolution of the fundamental frequency of vibration of the R/C frame during the tests is also described. The beneficial effects of using base isolation resulted in no or slight damage, under strong earthquakes, to both structural and non‐structural members, as well as to the internal content of the building. The comparison with the experimental results obtained in shaking‐table tests on similar fixed‐base models emphasizes these positive aspects. Finally, advantages and drawbacks related to the use of each isolation system are discussed in the paper. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Shake table tests for the seismic fragility evaluation of hospital rooms

Health care facilities may undergo severe and widespread damage that impairs the functionality of the system when it is stricken by an earthquake. Such detrimental response is emphasized either for the hospital buildings designed primarily for gravity loads or without employing base isolation/supplemental damping systems. Moreover, these buildings need to warrant operability especially in the aftermath of moderate‐to‐severe earthquake ground motions. The provisions implemented in the new seismic codes allow obtaining adequate seismic performance for the hospital structural components; nevertheless, they do not provide definite yet reliable rules to design and protect the building contents. To date, very few experimental tests have been carried out on hospital buildings equipped with nonstructural components as well as building contents. The present paper is aimed at establishing the limit states for a typical health care room and deriving empirical fragility curves by considering a systemic approach. Toward this aim, a full scale three‐dimensional model of an examination (out patients consultation) room is constructed and tested dynamically by using the shaking table facility of the University of Naples, Italy. The sample room contains a number of typical medical components, which are either directly connected to the panel boards of the perimeter walls or behave as simple freestanding elements. The outcomes of the comprehensive shaking table tests carried out on the examination room have been utilized to derive fragility curves based on a systemic approach. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

改进的基础隔震结构地震作用简化计算方法

在《建筑抗震设计规范》(GB50011-2001)关于隔震结构的简化计算方法中,水平向减震系数的表达式和定义有些不符,假定的隔震结构地震作用分布规律也与实际情况略有出入。本文基于水平向减震系数的定义和实际隔震结构的地震作用分布规律提出了一种改进的隔震结构水平向减震系数、隔震结构总地震作用、隔震结构上部地震作用分布的计算方法,并提出了总水平地震作用减震系数的新概念。本文提出的改进方法具有表达准确、物理意义明确的特点。将本文提出的改进算法计算结果与时程分析计算结果比较,结果显示,改进方法的计算结果与时程分析结果接近,且分布规律一致。     

Investigations into the benefits of base isolation for non‐symmetric rigid blocks

In this paper the influence of base isolation on the behaviour of a work of art has been analysed. To make things more realistic, the work of art has been modelled with a non‐symmetrical rigid body, sitting on a base that is connected to a visco‐elastic device, which represents the passive control system. To prevent the breaking of the isolation device, security stops have been introduced to limit the displacement of the oscillating base to a maximum safety value. All analyses have been carried out comparing the behaviour of the non‐isolated and the isolated non‐symmetric rigid body subject to impulsive and seismic excitations. The analysis is particularly focused on the effects of the eccentricity of the rigid body and on the presence of the security stops. Generally, base isolation improves the behaviour of the system while the presence of an eccentricity makes the performance of the system worse with respect to the symmetric rigid body. Moreover the security stops, although they preserve the isolator devices, cause a worsening in the performance of the systems. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Seismic response of heavily damped base isolation systems

The development of an efficient energy-dissipating mechanism that works in conjunction with laminated elastomeric bearings in order to reduce the lateral deformation of the isolation system has always been a goal of base isolation research. Theoretically, this deformation will be reduced to the minimum if damping augmentation of the isolation system can reach a critical value. However, augmenting the isolation damping may cause some unwanted side effects. The purpose of this paper is to study the influence of isolation damping on the seismic response of heavily damped base-isolated buildings. The base isolation system is assumed to be linearly viscoelastic and is analysed using the complex mode method. Solutions derived by using perturbation techniques for a two-degree-of-freedom system and the computer simulation for a multiple-degree-of-freedom system reveal that augmenting the isolation damping can reduce efficiently the deformation of the isolation system, but at the price of increasing the high-frequency vibration in the superstructure. When the damping ratio of the isolation system is beyond some level, increasing the isolation damping will enlarge the extreme values of the base and superstructural accelerations. It is also found that approximate solutions derived from the use of classical damping and classical modes of vibration in the seismic analysis of heavily damped base isolation systems can be substantially in error.     

Design of bilinear hysteretic isolation systems

This paper concerns the design of passive base isolation systems characterized by a bilinear hysteretic behaviour. The study refers to the case where the structure to be isolated (superstructure) vibrates according to the first mode. In this case the whole isolated structure can be modelled by a two‐degree‐of‐freedom system. The base isolation effectiveness has been evaluated for different characteristics of the device, namely mass, strength, elastic and plastic stiffness, by using mainly energetic quantities. The optimum values for the base device have been obtained by minimizing the input energy and the displacement of the superstructure. Conclusions are drawn for superstructures with a fundamental period of 0.5s, a damping ratio of 5% and for three different kinds of earthquake ground motions. The study showed that the seismic input greatly affects the behaviour of the isolated structure, and therefore the design ground motion must be carefully chosen, dependent on the characteristics of the site. A simple procedure that involves mainly linear dynamic analyses is proposed for the design of base devices used in conjunction with superstructures of any fundamental vibration period. The procedure produces good results in spite of its simplicity, and therefore it is suitable for practical use by design engineers. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Automated Estimation of Seismic Shaking Intensity from Instrumental Data in Quasi-Real-time Mode and Its Use in the Operation of the of Seismic Early Warning Service in the Kamchatka Region

Early warning systems are becoming increasingly important in the modern world. These systems combine several components: predictive systems (For example, tsunami warning systems), earthquake early warning systems, emergency message services, and systems of seismic damage monitoring. Information about shaking intensity becomes especially important in the case of a strong earthquake occurrence. These data are necessary for planning emergency rescue operations, but they are difficult to collect in a natural disasters situation because of possible communication problems. Application of data on instrumental seismic intensity may make it possible to solve this problem. Early warning systems predicting seismic intensity distributions just after the occurrence of an earthquake have already been developed in many seismically active regions of the world. Such a system also needs to be implemented in Kamchatka, where the strongest earthquakes can produce extremely high values of strong motion acceleration. As a result of the development of a system for seismological observation in Kamchatka, a unified specialized system for collection, transmission, archiving, and processing of seismic information was created. Seismological observations in Kamchatka were significantly improved with the update of the tsunami warning service in 2006–2011. As a result, a network of strong motion stations is currently operating in Kamchatka and can serve as a basis for creating a quasi-real-time seismic early warning system under the auspices the Kamchatka Branch of the Geophysical Survey, Russian Academy of Sciences (KB GS RAS). It uses data from strong motion stations to estimate the instrumental seismic intensity in quasi-real-time mode and visualizes the results. During the operational period while the service is being intensively used in the framework of the Seismic Early Warning Reports Tsunami Warning Service in the Kamchatka and Sakhalin branches of the GS RAS for real-time warning of interested parties about the shaking intensities at observation points, the technology implemented in this service has proved highly informative. In total, 75 messages on instrumental intensity in various places of Kamchatka krai and the northern Kuril Islands (Paramushir Islands) have been sent since the service was commissioned at the end of 2014. The currently operating version of the service has proved its informativeness and applicability for special departments of the Emergency Situations Ministry. In addition, real-time warning has improved coordination between the departments of KB GS RAS, and the results of this system are being used in a number of basic research projects. Further development of the service is related to the creation of denser instrumental networks to record strong ground motions and the transition to automatic decision-making and message sending.     

Coda waves: A review

The analysis and interpretation of coda waves have received increasing attention since the early seventies. In the past few years interest in this subject has spread worldwide, and the study of high-frequency seismic coda waves has become a very important seismological topic. As a conclusion of the studies accomplished in this time, coda waves are considered the result of scattering processes caused by heterogeneities acting on seismic waves.P andS waves play a particularly important role in this interaction. The process introduces an attenuation which, added to the intrinsic absorption, gives the observed apparent attenuation. Therefore, coda waves constitute a thumbprint left by the heterogeneities on the seismograms. Coda waves offer decisive information about the mechanism of how scattering and attenuation take place. This review describes coda waves in detail, and summarizes the work done in this subject to 1986. The relation between coda waves and attenuation in the context of research on seismic scattering problems is stressed. Particular attention has been given to the application of coda waves to estimate source and medium parameters. The state-of-the-art of the temporal variations of coda wave shape, and the possible use of these variations as an earthquake precursor also are presented. Care has been taken to introduce the statistical models used to deal with the heterogeneities responsible for scattering.     

地震动速度脉冲对巨型结构体系地震响应影响研究

以巨-子结构抗震体系、隔震体系以及智能隔震体系为研究对象,选择4组具有速度脉冲特性的实际地震动加速度记录及人工模拟的具有相同加速度反应谱而无速度脉冲的地震动时程分别作为地震动输入,采用数值分析方法分别计算在有、无速度脉冲的地震动激励下三种结构体系的地震响应,探讨地震动的速度脉冲对巨型结构体系在不同控制策略下地震响应的影响。研究结果表明:三种结构体系在速度脉冲型地震动作用下的地震响应大部分要大于无速度脉冲型的地震响应,近断层地震动的速度脉冲对巨-子结构抗震体系、隔震体系以及智能隔震体系的地震响应均有一定的不利影响。智能隔震体系对速度脉冲地震动较为敏感,但能有效地减小隔震层位移。     

Optimal energy‐based seismic design of non‐conventional Tuned Mass Damper (TMD) implemented via inter‐story isolation

Inter‐story isolation, an effective strategy for mitigating the seismic risk of both new and existing buildings, has gained more and more interest in recent years as alternative to base isolation, whenever the latter results to be impractical, technically difficult or uneconomic. As suggested by the name, the technique consists in inserting flexible isolators at floor levels other than the base along the height of a multi‐story building, thus realizing a non‐conventional Tuned Mass Damper (TMD). Consistent with this, an optimal design methodology is developed in the present paper with the objective of achieving the global protection of both the structural portions separated by the inter‐story isolation system, that is, the lower portion (below the isolation system) and the isolated upper portion (above the isolation system). The optimization procedure is formulated on the basis of an energy performance criterion that consists in maximizing the ratio between the energy dissipated in the isolation system and the input energy globally transferred to the entire structure. Numerical simulations, performed under natural accelerograms with different frequency content and considering increasing isolation levels along the height of a reference frame structure, are used to investigate the seismic performance of the optimized inter‐story isolation systems. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

RIGIDITY–PLASTICITY–VISCOSITY: CAN ELECTRORHEOLOGICAL DAMPERS PROTECT BASE-ISOLATED STRUCTURES FROM NEAR-SOURCE GROUND MOTIONS?

The concept of seismic protection by lengthening the fundamental period of the structure has been implemented through a number of isolation systems. While flexible isolation systems can effectively protect structures from earthquakes containing high frequencies and sharp accelerations, they might amplify the response of the structure when subjected to rapid, long-period motions. In this case of long period excitations the stiff superstructure should be ‘locked’ to the ground, rather than be supported on flexible bearings. This paper shows through a comprehensive analytical study that a practical solution to this problem is to provide additional rigidity to the structure using a friction-type mechanism (rigid-plastic behaviour). The presence of friction-type forces reduce substantially the relative displacements of a single-degree-of-freedom structure by keeping accelerations at low levels; however, they are responsible for the presence of permanent displacements. Accordingly, the use of controllable fluid dampers is proposed and it is shown that they can be a practical solution to the problem. The response of a single-degree-of-freedom base-isolated structures is investigated, and the feasibility of a proposed electrorheological damper to deliver the required forces is discussed. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

关于震情窗口问题的实践和展望

本文概述了自1978年5月提出震情窗口以来,经过6年多时间,在一些多震区不断实践和多种尝试所得的最新的全部成果.根据一震有多窗反应,并由此而能粗略地推测出未来大震的时间、空间、强度三要素的事实,今后若能在窗口附近设台以观察、研究其小震的活动与附近大震的关系,并根据各地窗口的区域特点而直接投入当地的监测预报,则可以达到应用的目的.提出了建立震情网或窗口网的设想,这不仅对地震学本身的研究工作有益,而且在以震报震方面具有现实意义.实际上,根据多震区现有的基础,已经具备了这种工作的现实性和可能性.      

Seismic response of segmental buildings

This paper proposes an aseismic design concept in which the superstructure of a base-isolated building is divided into several segments. Each segment may comprise a few storeys and is interconnected by additional vibrational isolation systems. The dynamic characteristics of the segmental buildings are investigated. The optimum parameters of the vibration isolation systems are determined by minimizing the mean square acceleration response. The seismic response of a typical segmental building subjected to the N—S component of the 1940 El Centro earthquake input is evaluated and compared with the responses of the corresponding fixed-base and conventional base-isolated buildings. The comparisons show that, when the superstructure is segmented, while the acceleration response in the superstructure remains as small as that in the conventional base-isolated building, the displacement across the base isolation system at foundation level is substantially reduced.