On the Use of Meta-Foundations for Seismic Isolation: A Practical Application for Conventional Buildings

Abstract

This paper presents an attempt to evaluate the feasibility and the effectiveness of an innovative foundation, which relies on the concept of local resonance, from a practical point of view. The proposed composite foundation integrates the well-established isolation system of lead rubber bearings in a layered structure form with reinforced concrete slabs, in order to tackle the inherent drawbacks of the bearing isolation. The novel foundation concept is implemented in a realistic structural geometry, designed according to the current standards, and the seismic performance is evaluated and compared against the corresponding typical base isolated and conventional stiff designed buildings. The results show that the proposed foundation concept achieves superior seismic performance in comparison to standard base isolation, providing an applicable and cost efficient solution in the framework of metafoundations. 5323 COMPDYN 2019 7 th ECCOMAS Thematic Conference on Computational Methods in Structural Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering M. Papadrakakis, M. Fragiadakis (eds.