Experimental and Analytical Study on Multiaxial Hysteresis Behavior of Lead Rubber Bearings

Experimental and Analytical Study on Multiaxial Hysteresis Behavior of Lead Rubber Bearings

In this study, lead rubber bearings, which have been extensively applied in many seismic isolation designs for buildings, infrastructure, and facilities worldwide, were tested under unilateral reversal loading as well as non-proportional plane loading, including circular and figure-eight orbits. The test results indicate that unlike the unilateral hysteretic behavior, the bilateral behavior of lead rubber bearings is too complicated to be characterized adequately by a simplified bilinear hysteretic model using a bilateral coupling effect. The applicability and robustness of adopting Hwang et al.’s model for describing the coupled bilateral hysteretic behavior of lead rubber bearings are demonstrated by comparing their predictions with the unilateral reversal loading and non-proportional plane loading test results.