Study on Vibration Isolation Systems for Sensitive Equipment

In major earthquakes there are some buildings which should stand functionally after main shock, like hospitals, relief and fire centers and so on, where sensitive devices should work properly after vibrations even if the structure faces severe damage itself. Consequently, vibration isolation of sensitive equipment has attracted many researchers' interest. Equipment may be divided into two groups, namely floor mounted equipment and on the ground equipment. For the second group, there is a conventional method of analysis which is considering the isolation system with ground records as input. Floor mounted equipment are different since the transferred vibrations and forces through the building is different from ground vibrations. This change in transferred is also dependent upon the building, therefore in this study 4 models of 3, 10, 20, and 40-story buildings are considered as representative for low-rise, mid-rise, and high-rise buildings. Performing nonlinear time history analysis by selecting several ground motion records, floor responses considered as input excitation for the floor mounted equipment and effects of various design parameters on the seismic performance of sensitive equipment due to acceleration is studied.

Keywords:

Acceleration Sensitive Equipment , Seismic Performance , Seismic Isolation