Seismic base isolation

It is meant to enable a building or non-building structure to survive a potentially devastating seismic impact through a proper initial design or subsequent modifications.

The technique has been incorporated to protect statues and other works of art—see, for instance, Rodin's Gates of Hell at the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo's Ueno Park.

As historians discovered thousands of years later, this system worked exactly as its designers had predicted, and as a result, the Tomb of Cyrus the Great still stands today.

[15] Through the George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES), researchers are studying the performance of base isolation systems.

NEES resources have been used for experimental and numerical simulation, data mining, networking and collaboration to understand the complex interrelationship among the factors controlling the overall performance of an isolated structural system.

This project involves earthquake shaking table and hybrid tests at the NEES experimental facilities at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University at Buffalo, aimed at understanding ultimate performance limits to examine the propagation of local isolation failures (e.g., bumping against stops, bearing failures, uplift) to the system level response.

Records obtained from lakebed sites in the 1985 Mexico City earthquake raised concerns of the possibility of resonance, but such examples were considered exceptional and predictable.

Specifically, the review focuses on descriptions of the dynamic behavior and distinguishing features of various systems which have been experimentally tested both at the component level and within small scale structural models.