Masonry construction is the most popular and suitable for housing purposes in almost all developing countries. Base isolation in the form of pure friction is the simplest (P-F) among all isolation so far developed which can easily applied to low cost brick masonry buildings. The effect of the earthquake ground motion on the behaviour of isolation system is investigated analytically by using a synthetic accelerogram that is compatible with the design spectrum of IS 1893 (Part 1): 2002 corresponding to the level of maximum considered earthquake in the most severe seismic zone (PGA=0.36g). It is observed that, maximum reduction in spectral acceleration occurs with decrease in coefficient of friction at the cost of increased base sliding displacement. But for structures with Tn<0.2 sec maximum sliding displacement is 50mm for coefficient of friction 0.1. As most of masonry buildings are stiff structures with time period less than 0.2 second the sliding displacement are within plinth projection of 75. Hence P-F isolation is one of the best alternatives for reducing earthquake energy transmission to super structure during strong earthquake leading to lesser damages in masonry buildings.

Hybrid control system composed of a base isolation system and a magneto-rheological damper so-called smart base isolation is one of effective semi-active control system in controlling the seismic response of structures. In this paper, a design method is proposed for designing the smart base isolation system in order to achieve an effective performance under multiple earthquakes. The base mass, the base stiffness and the weighting parameter of H2/linear quadratic Gaussian control algorithm, which is used to determine the desired control force, have been considered as the design variables and different earthquake records have been considered as design earthquakes. First, the optimum values of these variables under each of the considered earthquakes have been determined by using the genetic algorithm and then, an optimum control system has been designed with multiple earthquakes-based design approach. The defined design objective is minimizing the peak base drift while the peak inter-story drift has been constrained. For numerical simulation, smart base isolation system is designed for controlling a four-story shear frame. The results show that when the control system designed for a specific earthquake is subjected to another earthquake, difference between the performance of this control system and the optimal case under that earthquake is considerable. Hence, the specific earthquake-based design approach is an inappropriate design procedure for smart base isolation. Also, it has been found that control system designed based on multiple earthquakes-based design approach shows effective performance in controlling the response of structure under a wide range of earthquakes.

In this paper a new isolating system is introduced for short to mid-rise buildings. In comparison to conventional systems such as LRB and HRB, the proposed system has the advantage of no need to cutting edge technology and has low manufacturing cost. This system is made up of two orthogonal pairs of pillow-shaped rollers that are located between flat bed and plates. By using this system in two perpendicular directions, building can move in all horizontal directions with respect to its foundation. Due to the pillow shape of the roller, this system has self-centering capability which causes it to return to its original position after the earthquake. The rolling friction force between pillows and their bed creates some damping in the system which prevents it from further oscillation after earthquake excitations diminish. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the proposed isolation system’s performance under different earthquake excitations. First of all general features of the proposed isolators have been introduced followed by the analytical equations of the system. Vertical bearing capacity and the effects of the thickness of pillows has been investigated using ABAQUS software. It has been shown that for a pair of pillows of 58 cm width, 45 cm height and 100 cm length the vertical load bearing capacity of the system is more than 300 tons. The period of system with respect to the height and radius of curvature of the rollers, and seismic response of a building, assumed as a rigid body resting on isolators, has been studied subjected to simultaneous effects of horizontal and vertical excitations. It has been shown that the proposed system can reduce the absolute acceleration in the building around 78% in average, while the building’s maximum displacement is around 1.77 times of the ground in average.

Rolling-based seismic isolation systems, in which rollers of circular or non-circular section are used, are less expensive and easier to manufacture. However, this type of isolation suffers from either lack of restoring or re-centering capability, or weakness against uplift forces. To resolve the first shortcoming the use of elliptical as well as pillow-shape rolling parts has been suggested, and for the second one, using some uplift restrainers has been proposed. In this paper a kind of base isolating device, called Pillow-Shape Seismic Base Isolation System (PSBIS) is introduced which has both re-centering and uplift-restrained capabilities. The paper is concentrated on derivation of equation governing the motion of PSBIS device. To derive this equation, since the behavior of the device is highly nonlinear the use of Lagrange equation of motion is the most appropriate approach. For this purpose, considering the rotation angle of the pillow-shape roller as the generalized coordinate, the horizontal and vertical components of the pillow-shape roller acceleration have been formulated and the kinetic and potential energy terms as well as the virtual work of the non-conservative, resulted from rolling resistance and seismic forces, have been developed to be substituted in the basic Lagrange equation. To verify the derived equation of motion a simplified sample of the PSBIS device was built and used experimentally, and also the motion of the pillow-shape parts was traced by drawing them in Auto-CAD software. Results show the validity of the derived equation of motion.

Regarding the high cost of retrofitting and replacing the isolation system after an earthquake, re-centering seismic isolation systems have become one of the most popular research fields in the past decades. A new generation of seismic isolation is based on equipment with improved performance in terms of damping and re-centering capability. Since lead-rubber base isolation (LRB) is one of the most common seismic isolation systems, this paper focused on suggesting a re-centering LRB system with high damping capacity. The LRB isolation is based on an experimental study under a constant vertical load equal to 650 kN. The proposed combined system of LRB and friction yields a high damping capacity. A spherical shell is placed on the base isolation system, and the friction reaction emanates from this shell's sliding on the provided foundation. The primary purpose of this spherical shell is to increase the damping capacity of the isolation system. An adjustable friction reaction is reachable depending on the connection details of the spherical steel shell with the system's upper steel cap plate. The higher stiffness of this connection is provided greater friction force and, as a result, higher damping capacity. In short, this connection was performed as adjustable friction and can increase energy dissipation and maximum shear force, respectively, in the range of 12% to 80% and 6% to 230%. Increasing re-centering capacity is another goal of this study. It is of great interest to implement shape memory alloy (SMA) in the form of wires because of their re-centering capabilities. The axisymmetric design is implemented to reduce this hybrid system's vulnerability to earthquakes of arbitrary direction. The combined action of wires and the spherical steel shell provides the re-centering capacity of the system. The final system, which is a combination of LRB, friction mechanism, and vertical load transfer through SMA wires (MDLRB-SMA), exhibits enhanced properties such as reduced residual deformation, controllable shear reaction at each stage of the deformation, and increased damping capacity. The energy dissipation capacity of the MDLRB-SMA is shown to be increased by 50%, with a decreased residual deformation of up to 45% compared to the LRB. A set of parametric studies are also performed to investigate the influence of frequency, displacement amplitude, loading rate, the wires' configuration and properties, and the aspect ratio of the system's performance.