In Japan, the study on the development of a 3-dimensional base isolation system to be applied to a nuclear power plant, which requires supreme safety against severe earthquakes, has been carried out since 2000. An idea with the concept of a cable reinforced air spring was proposed as the 3-dimensional base isolation device. The dimension of the air spring applying to the actual power plant is 9 meters in the outer-diameter and 3.5 meters in height. The allowable half strokes are respectively 1.5 meters for the horizontal direction and 0.5 meters for the vertical directions. The supporting weight for a single device is 52MN, where the inner air pressure is about 1.2MPa. This device enables to realize three-dimensional base isolation with a single device, whose characteristics is a natural period of over 4 seconds in the horizontal direction and over 3 seconds in the vertical direction. Furthermore, this device does not require precision mechanical parts just common building materials, which are steel, cable wire, polyester fabric and a rubber sheet. Therefore, the construction cost for this device could be reduced effectively. In order to confirm the performance of the proposed device, experimental tests using the three dimensional shaking table were carried out on the proposed cable reinforced 3-dimensional base isolation air spring, whose outer diameter is 2 meters, being 1/4.5 scale of the actual size. The weight of approximately 392kN including a 4-story steel frame was loaded on the test specimen in order to create inner air pressure of 0.157MPa. As a result, the device was confirmed to function smoothly in three dimensions with natural periods of 1.8 seconds in the horizontal direction and 1.4 seconds in the vertical direction, and is considered that the proposed system can be applied to actual power plants.

The authors proposed a newly three-dimensional isolation system, consisting of a rubber bearing, vertical oil dampers and disc spring units, to reduce the seismic response in the vertical direction as well as horizontal direction. This isolation system is employed with a number of disc spring units to provide the vertical restoring force to the superstructure. The disc spring units are combined by three disc springs in parallels and they are are stacked in six serials. The vertical restoring force has susceptible to the variation forces for the individual disc springs because the disc spring units are combined in the six serials. The The purpose of this paper is to present two kinds of proposal to improve the quality control of our isolation system and the prediction accuracy of seismic response. The first is to create the the optimal combination method for the disc spring units using the meta-heuristic algorithm to minimize the variation of vertical vertical restoring force. The proposed optimal method was verified through the result of static loading tests using the 72 disc springs which have the half dimensions to full scale. The second is to create a newly analytical model for the friction force caused by polymeric materials. The proposed analytical model was verified by comparing the loading test results. Moreover, the seismic isolation performances were clarified by the seismic response analysis that consider the vertical restoring force of the disc spring units which were combined using the optimal method and the friction force of sliding elements which were modeled by the proposed friction model. This analytical result revealed that our isolation system can reduce the seismic response not only for the high frequency components but also the low frequency ones.

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This paper described the results of the static loading tests using a half-scale thick rubber bearing to investigate the fundamental characteristics such as horizontal and vertical restoring force of a rubber bearing applied to a Sodium-cooled-Fast-Reactor (SFR). Since the SFR has thin-walled component structures, a seismic isolation system is employed to mitigate the seismic force. A rubber bearing with thick rubber layers is used for the seismic isolation system applied to the SFR, it was developed aiming for isolation of not only horizontal response acceleration, but also vertical response acceleration. The thick rubber bearing of 1600 mm in diameter full-scale was designed to provide about a 10000 kN rated load with a horizontal natural period of 3.4 s and a vertical one of 0.125 s. Moreover, a linear strain limit of the thick rubber bearing was designed to accept a horizontal displacement of 700 mm or more in order to ensure a double safety margin for response displacements against a design basis ground motion. The static loading tests were performed using a half-scale thick rubber bearing with a diameter of 800 mm to investigate the horizontal/vertical stiffness, damping ratio, a linear strain limit in horizontal direction and a tensile yield stress in the vertical direction. The fundamental characteristic of rubber bearings employed to the SFR and the validity of a design formula became clear through the static loading tests.