Seismic Behavior of Buildings with Mid-story Isolation

Seismic Behavior of Buildings with Mid-story Isolation

Learning from the satisfactory performance of structures with isolation systems during several earthquakes, the applications of seismic isolation systems have become much more extensive worldwide in the last decade. In Taiwan, it is particularly worthy of noting that more and more cases of the so-called “mid-story isolation” can be observed due to the considerations of cost effectiveness, construction quality or other constrains such as high population and construction space limitation. However, at present there are very few studies regarding the mid-story isolated structure. Therefore, this research aims at estimating the seismic response of mid-story isolated structures and addressing the corresponding special issues and recommendations. Both the response spectrum and response history analyses were performed to discuss not only the effect of the abovementioned parameters but also the remarkable participation of the higher modes. The analytical study of the new Civil Engineering Research Building of National Taiwan University(NTU) is provided to study the feasibility of mid-story isolated structures.