Experimental and numerical study on the static and hysteretic behavior of a novel wood isolation device

Abstract

This paper presents a novel wood isolation device able to reduce the whiplash effect of the wood-concrete hybrid structure under the earthquake. The device inherits the configuration of the ancient wood Dou-Gong by using some short wood components buckling each other, and makes use of sliding friction, rotary deformation of partial components and wood nonlinear deformation to dissipate energy. Both static and low-cyclic loading experiments as well as numerical simulations were performed to study the mechanical properties, hysteretic characteristics and energy dissipation capacity of the isolation device. The results indicate that the wood isolation device has sufficient vertical bearing capacity, stiffness, initial lateral stiffness and lateral deformation capacity. Under horizontal low-cyclic loading, its energy-dissipation is characterized by three stages, namely, initial deformation, horizontal sliding and post-sliding secondary deformation. Their hysteretic loops correspond to the reverse S-shape, parallelogram with sawtooth and full Z-shape, respectively. This observation indicates that the isolation device can consume some energy under frequent earthquake, and has excellent energy-dissipation capacity when the sliding occurs. Based on the hysteretic loops, the four-piecewise line model is proposed to describe the skeleton curve and restoring force model of the isolation device. The wood isolation device proposed in this paper not only inherits the essence of the ancient Dou-Gong but also exhibits excellent isolation performance, and thus has a potential application in practical engineering.