Seismic Behavior of a Newly Developed Base Isolation System for Houses

Abstract

The good performance of seismically isolated structures during the 1995 Kobe earthquake persuaded structural engineers, isolator manufacturers and housing construction companies to undertake a cooperative research project to investigate the possibility of introducing the seismic isolation technology in Japan's private housing sector. As a part of this project, in this study, the seismic performance of a recently developed Friction Pendulum System (FPS) for houses is presented. In order to verify its behavior under recorded earthquake ground motions, 3-dimensional shaking table tests were conducted. A three-dimensional nonlinear model was used to simulate the experimentally recorded acceleration and displacement response. Experimental results showed that the FPS significantly reduced the acceleration response at both moderate and strong levels of input ground motion. The analytical model used in this study satisfactorily predicted the experimentally recorded acceleration and displacement response time histories.