Fragility Assessment of Geotechnical Seismic Isolated (GSI) Configurations

Davide Forcellini

doi:10.3390/en14165088

Abstract

Geotechnical seismic isolation (GSI) consists of an innovative technique to mitigate the effects of earthquakes based on interposing a superficial soil layer to filter the seismic energy from the soil to the structure. This approach is particularly applied in developing countries due to low-cost applications. In order to account the uncertainties, the presented paper aimed to develop fragility curves of 3D configurations performed by numerical finite element models. The mail goal is to assess and discuss the potentialities of GSI as a mitigation technique for several configurations. Opensees PL has been applied to perform the numerical analyses and to realistically reproduce the behaviour of GSI.

Highlights

Geotechnical Seismic Isolation (GSI) consists of a novel technique that applies different materials to reduce costs connected with traditional base isolation
This paper develops analytical fragility curves on the bases of the analyses that were performed with the 4 configurations and 70 input motions
Following the previous contribution [1] where the capacity of the GSI was compared with the convectional foundation without considering any isolation approach, this section investigates the effects of several the location of the liner by comparing the four selected configurations

Summary

Introduction

Geotechnical Seismic Isolation (GSI) consists of a novel technique that applies different materials to reduce costs (installation and maintenance of the devices) connected with traditional base isolation. In this regard, many materials have been proposed, such as rubber–soil mixtures (RSM), geofoam, geomembranes/geotextiles, rocking isolation and natural stone pebbles, and kart tyres, as shown in [1]. Due to the level of its novelty, GSI applications required many experiments to prove their reliability In this regard, experimental tests were conducted on shaking tables [8,9]. Tsiavos et al [10]

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Conclusion