Work

Design and performance evaluation of seismic isolation bearings with oblique viscous damper for protection of essential equipment and components

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Earthquakes can significantly impact essential equipment and components, e.g., high-precision manufacturing equipment and valuable assets. Thus, one of the solutions is to install isolation bearings underneath essential equipment and components and to enhance seismic performance. Still, excessive isolation displacements may occur during large earthquakes, and additional damping devices are highly recommended to be installed along with the isolation bearings. This combination is often designed under design-level earthquakes, and the resulting performance may not be effective for under or beyond design-level earthquakes. Therefore, this research aims to establish a design method to achieve multiple performance objectives for isolation bearings with an oblique viscous damper to the horizontal direction at the equilibrium position and then to protect essential equipment and components. These multiple performance objectives consider comparable performance in the design-level earthquakes and higher reductions in isolation accelerations and displacements in the under and beyond design-level earthquakes, as compared to the conventional isolation system (i.e., the viscous damper parallel to the horizontal direction). In this study, a design method for single-curvature isolation bearings with an oblique viscous damper is developed using a stochastic linearization approach. This approach constructs a relationship among the nonlinear parameters (i.e., oblique angle, pin-to-pin length, linearly viscous damping coefficient) and linearized ones (i.e., stiffness parameter and damping coefficient), while the stochastic design method considers the nonstationary effects of earthquakes. These nonlinear parameters are consequently optimized to achieve multiple performance objectives against different levels of earthquakes. This study carries out several cases to demonstrate the design process and considers different initial oblique angles, pin-to-pin lengths, and damping coefficients. The performance of the proposed system with design parameters in actual earthquake scenarios is further evaluated numerically. Moreover, the dynamic characteristics and practical advantages of the proposed system are also investigated and discussed in the study.

Source: Engineering Structures

DOI: 10.1016/j.engstruct.2025.120420

Authors: Chieh-Yu Liu, Chia-Ming Chang

Language: English

Topic: Vibration Control and Rheological Fluids

Subfield: Civil and Structural Engineering

Field: Engineering

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDGs: Industry, innovation and infrastructure, Sustainable cities and communities

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $4,620

Funder: National Science and Technology Council