NON-LINEAR EFFECTS IN THE ANTISIESMIC VISCOELASTIC ISOLATORS

It is shown that an acceptable model for the behavior of a building standing on viscoelastic isolators is a system of nonlinear differential equations with stochastic excitation. The computation of an approximate solution of this system by an original numerical method derived from the equivalent linearization method shows that the nonlinearities have little effect on the dynamic behavior of the structure and thus do not alter the efficiency of the setup.