Abstract

In the last decade, the focus of performance-based earthquake engineering has shifted towards the design of earthquake resilient structures. Therefore, an important challenge today is to provide design solutions where residual structural damage is minimized. Rocking mechanisms at the foundation-structure interface have been proposed to isolate the structure by limiting the inertial forces on the superstructure. This presentation investigates the ability of rocking to isolate structures from strong ground motion. The talk will start with a brief discussion on the critical differences between conventional base isolation and rocking isolation. A review of early studies and designs will then demonstrate how pioneering engineers dealt with the differences concerning the nonlinearity of rocking response and its interaction with structural vibrations. Then, a detailed analytical and experimental investigation of the fundamental dynamics of idealized flexible rocking structures will follow. This investigation highlights the coupling of rocking action with vibrations, and demonstrates how this coupling modifies the vibration response of the structure. The findings are further discussed to evaluate the aforementioned design assumptions and to investigate how to improve dynamic performance by utilizing dampers.