3D NUMERICAL SIMULATION OF STOREY ISOLATION ON TALL BUILDINGS

Abstract eng:
Isolation technique on tall buildings is becoming increasingly common in large urban centers in order to ensure structural integrity and performance. In particular, while base isolation allows to decouple the structure from the ground considering the entire structure as a unique block, story isolation (SI) is able to separate upper levels from lower parts. The techinque consists of intentionally concentrating seismic energy dissipation in interfaces between selected parts of the structures in order to interrupt the flux of energy between stories. In literature there are applications that investigate story isolated structures with numerical simulations, such as Koh and Kobayashi, 2000, Li et al., 2002, Pochas and Pamboris, 2009, Desai Amit and Gajjar, 2012 and Charmpis et al. 2015. This paper aims at studying a case of a 20-story building previously reproduced as a scaled model on a small shake table. The sample was printed with 3D printer new technology, as shown in Gallanti and Forcellini (2016). The building is here simulated with a 3D finite element model built with the open-source computational interface OpenSeesPL, implemented within the FE code OpenSees. This framework performs non-linear dynamic analysis, by applying the most credited theories to model the structure and soil, model interfaces, boundary conditions and isolators. Opensees allows to assess the structural performance, by considering accelerations and displacements at various heights. Thanks to these potentialities, it was possible to demonstrate firstly that SI has beneficial effects on period elongation. Secondly, the results show the benefit of SI in reducing the displacements and acceleration along the height of the structure. In this regard, the study can be considered one of the few attempts to evaluate the relatively novel technique of SI on tall buildings with advanced numerical simulations such as Opensees. It allows to propose new design considerations for engineers and consultants all over the world.

• Export as: BibTeX | MARC | MARCXML | DC | EndNote | NLM | RefWorks
• Add to your basket