Abstract
Near-fault pulse motions will cause excessive and much larger base displacement in traditional isolated structures than common earthquake motions. The new isolation system inspired by the “sacrificial bonds and hidden length” biomechanics of an abalone shell can control the base displacement efficiently and reach almost the same vibration isolation efficiency as a semi-active control system. The current research is confined to the lumped mass model and cannot uncover the exact performance of isolators and structures in practical applications. A user subroutine is developed based on the interface of UEL in Abaqus. Subsequent verification has been done in both the lumped mass model and 3D complex model with Abaqus, Matlab/Simulink, and SAP2000. It can be revealed from the comparative results that the calculation accuracy of the secondary developed user subroutine can meet the demand of design and research.
Highlights
Earthquakes have caused an inestimable loss of life and property for human beings, both directly and indirectly
Shear forces in floor I and floor II are more liable to be controlled since the isolation layer is much closer to floor I and floor II. These results show that the bio-inspired isolation system may be sensitive to the aspect ratio
Under the excitation of the near-fault pulsed seismic wave which contains a significant long-term displacement pulse or velocity pulse, the isolation layer may tend to be destroyed as a result of excessive base displacement and lead to the loss of protection of the superstructure
Summary
Earthquakes have caused an inestimable loss of life and property for human beings, both directly and indirectly. The base isolation technique is an effective method to reduce earthquake action by adding an additional isolation layer [5,6,7,8,9]. To resolve the contradiction between the dynamic response of the superstructure and isolation layer, researchers have proposed active control, semi-active control, and hybrid control. The semi-active control system changes the stiffness or damping by inputting a modest amount of energy to the feedback of the dynamic response of the structure and the external excitation [21,22,23,24]. Yang proposed a new energy dissipation brace based on the biomechanism of “sacrificial bonds and hidden length” inspired from an abalone shell [27] It was verified from numerical simulation and tests that the new energy dissipation brace can reach an efficiency equal to that of the semi-active control method. Considering the two following advantages of Abaqus, the development and research work will be conducted in Abaqus: (1) Abaqus has a better performance in nonlinear analysis; and (2) there is a convenient transforming interface in Chinese universal structural design YJK for Abaqus
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