Investigation of the Sliding Response of a Rigid Body System Subjected to Uni-Direction Horizontal Dynamic and Earthquake Excitations

Abstract eng:
An experimental and numerical investigation is presented that studies the sliding response of a rigid body when subjected to horizontal dynamic and earthquake excitations. For this purpose, a steel block mock-up of a rigid body has been constructed and tested at the shaking table of Aristotle University. The dynamic excitations were based on either sinusoidal motions of various amplitudes and frequencies or simulated earthquake excitations based on actual recordings of prototype earthquake ground motions. The experimental results have shown that when sliding of this rigid block is permitted then its peak acceleration response is moderately amplified, provided that the excitation frequency is not close to the resonant frequency range of the block-spring dynamic system. This is particularly true for earthquake excitations and for relatively flexible spring-links thus achieving in this way a type of seismic isolation for the rigid block. A computer software was developed in order to numerically simulated this dynamic sliding response. The numerical results obtained through this specially developed computer software are next compared with the corresponding experimental measurements. The numerically predicted rigid block acceleration response is in good agreement, in all examined cases, with the measured values. The numerically predicted rigid body sliding displacement response also exhibits innumerous cases good agreement with the measured values. However, significant deviation between predicted and measured rigid body sliding displacement amplitudes were also observed. Despite these limitations of the predicted results it is believed that the developed software, although it deals with a complex problem in a relatively simple way, it can be useful in the preliminary design of structural systems with sliding capability at their support.

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