Experimental Study of Isolated Floor Systems

Abstract eng:
To protect the nonstructural components in critical facilities (such as hospitals), focusing in particular on the key sensitive components in some rooms, a combined solution is proposed in which a structure is designed per a structural fuse philosophy and selected floors are isolated. This paper focuses on the experimental work related to the performance of isolated floor systems. Two types of isolated floor systems are considered: (i) a first proprietary system adopting special multi-directional spring units, and; (ii) an isolated system using concrete ball-in-cone isolation bearings with polyurethane balls as rolling balls. These systems were tested on 6-DOF shake table. The floor seismic excitation was obtained from nonlinear time history analysis of an SDOF frame designed as a structural fuse frame. The test results show that the isolated floor systems work well. The mechanical properties of these two isolated floor systems are also obtained in terms of acceleration-displacement relationship, which provides the foundation to better simulate these isolated floor systems in future parametric study of the combined solution.

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