Fragility Assessment of Base Isolated Free Standing Museum Artifacts

Abstract

The seismic response evaluation of free standing building contents, has become a challenging task for the structural engineers. Artistic assets, which are placed on museums, are subjected to the floors' acceleration signal. In this view, it is obvious that the seismic action that affect the response of the floors non-structural contents is affected by the seismic response of the host building. The building contents, such as museum artifacts, are usually standing unanchored on a rigid base, and as such, they demonstrate rocking behavior under ground motion excitation. In the present study, the seismic response of rigid rocking blocks, with dimensions corresponding to museum assets, placed on the first floor of a two story reinforced concrete building is investigated. Base isolation is currently applied in contemporary museum buildings in order to reduce the ground motions' intensity. However, especially on existing museum buildings, base isolation can be easily implemented on the base of a specific cultural heritage object or a certain floor area in which artifacts of great importance are placed. These two different alternatives of base isolation configurations, mentioned above, are considered in the present study and fragility analysis is performed in order to evaluate each seismic mitigation method.

A procedure to model and design elastomeric‐based isolation systems for the seismic protection of rocking art objects

“…Kavvadias et al. (2019) focused on the seismic mitigation of a statue, modeled as a rigid body, placed on the top floor of a two‐story reinforced concrete frame building. The authors considered two cases of base isolation, both with the friction pendulum sliding bearings as isolation devices.…”

“…Contento and Di Egidio (2014) investigated the seismic protection of freestanding rigid bodies placed on a multi-floor with the base isolation modeled as a linear viscoelastic element. Kavvadias et al (2019) focused on the seismic mitigation of a statue, modeled as a rigid body, placed on the top floor of a two-story reinforced concrete frame building. The authors considered two cases of base isolation, both with the friction pendulum sliding bearings as isolation devices.…”

Seismic Protection of Cultural Heritage Artefacts by Means of Elastomeric Isolators: A Case Study

“…Nowadays the large majority of statues contained in museums are not equipped to resist oscillations induced by earthquakes. For this reason, seismic protection of artefacts belonging to the cultural heritage is a topic that has received significant interest over the last years [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. In particular, researchers focused on the study of the rocking behaviour of rigid bodies since the statues, which are simply supported on the floor or a pedestal, could overturn under seismic excitation.…”