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PREFACE:

Most structural engineers have at least a little knowledge of what base isolation is – a system of springs installed at the base of a structure to protect against earthquake damage. They know less about the when and why – when to use base isolation and why use it? When it comes to how, they either have too little knowledge or too much knowledge.

 Conflicting claims from promoters and manufacturers are confusing, contradictory and difficult to fully assess. Then, if a system can be selected from all the choices, there is the final set of hows– how to design the system, how to connect it to the structure, how to evaluate its performance and how to specify, test and build it. And, of course, the big how, how much does it cost.

These notes attempts to answer these questions, in sufficient detail for our practicing structural engineers, with little prior knowledge of base isolation, to evaluate whether isolation is suitable for their projects; decide what is the best system; design and detail the system; and document the process for construction.

The emphasis here is on design practice. The principles and mathematics of base isolation have been dealt with in detail in textbooks which contain rigorous treatments of the structural dynamics (see the two textbooks listed in the Bibliography, by Skinner, Robinson and McVerry [1993] and by Naiem and Kelly [1999]).

 These notes provide sufficient depth for our engineers to understand how the dynamics effect response but do not provide instructions as to how to solve the non-linear equations of motion governing the system response. As for much else in structural engineering, we have computer programs to do this part of the work for us.