SUMMARYFinite element analysis is carried out for a building frame supported by laminated rubber bearings to simultaneously investigate global displacement and local stress responses under seismic excitation. The frame members and the rubber bearings are discretized into hexahedral solid elements with more than 3 million degrees of freedom. The material property of rubber is represented by the Ogden model, and the frame is assumed to remain in elastic range. It is shown that the time histories of non-uniform stress distribution and rocking behavior of the rubber bearings under a frame subjected to seismic excitation can be successfully evaluated, and detailed responses of base and frame can be evaluated through large-scale finite element analysis.

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Dynamic finite element analyses of a four-story steel building frame modeled as a fine mesh of solid elements are performed using E-Simulator, which is a parallel finite element analysis software package for precisely simulating collapse behaviors of civil and building structures. E-Simulator is under development at the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention (NIED), Japan. A full-scale shake-table test for a four-story frame was conducted using E-Defense at NIED, which is the largest shaking table in the world. A mesh of the entire structure of a four-story frame with approximately 19 million degrees of freedom is constructed using solid elements. The density of the mesh is determined by referring to the results of elastic-plastic buckling analyses of a column of the frame using meshes of different densities. Therefore, the analysis model of the frame is well verified. Seismic response analyses under 60, 100, and 115% excitations of the JR Takatori record of the 1995 Hyogoken-Nanbu earthquake are performed. Note that the simulation does not reproduce the collapse under the 100% excitation of the Takatori record in the E-Defense test. Therefore, simulations for the 115% case are also performed. The results obtained by E-Simulator are compared with those obtained by the E-Defense full-scale test in order to validate the results obtained by E-Simulator. The shear forces and interstory drift angles of the first story obtained by the simulation and the test are in good agreement. Both the response of the entire frame and the local deformation as a result of elastic-plastic buckling are simulated simultaneously using E-Simulator.The main core of E-Simulator is the commercial software package ADVENTURECluster [4][5][6][7], which has been extended from the open-source version, the ADVENTURE system [8,9]. These packages use FE SIMULATION OF FOUR-STORY STEEL FRAME MODELED BY SOLID ELEMENTS

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