Earthquake Performance of RC Buildings Using Elastomeric Base Isolation Controls

Abstract

The devastation from earthquakes becomes unpredicted resulting to significant damage of civil structures, leads to loss of lives and property. The base isolation of passive control system is one of the most powerful techniques for protection of civil structures against to seismic hazard. The study in this paper has proposed two seismic controls, namely LRB control and NZ control to study the seismic performance of isolated RC building in terms of reduction in responses under four realistic unidirectional earthquakes. The computer codes have been generated in MATLAB 7® to analyze the building responses in which equations of motion are solved using Newmark’s method whereas Wen’s model is used to model the bearing force. The responses of isolated building are compared with responses of non-isolated building in terms of time varying displacement, acceleration in addition to peak response of displacement, acceleration and bearing displacement. The results of computer codes illustrate that both the proposed controls yields effective in reducing the responses of isolated building. Further, NZ control is relatively more effectively perform than LRB control in reducing the responses.