Stochastic Seismic Response Analysis of Base-Isolated High-rise Buildings

Stochastic seismic responses of a base-isolated high-rise building subjected to non-stationary random seismic earthquake ground motion are investigated by combining the pseudo excitation method and equivalent linearization method, for which the superstructure is modeled as a multi-degree-of-freedom system considering the shear-flexural effect, the hysteretic restoring forces of the isolators are described by the Bouc-Wen differential equation model which has a good performance on the transition from elastic responses to plastic responses. With the linearization for such a Wen's model, a first order differential equation will be obtained, which will couple with the governing equations of the isolated structure and so make up the closed-form expressions for base-isolated high-rise buildings, thus the stochastic seismic responses of the simplified systems will be obtained conveniently. Consequently, the solution of the stochastic seismic responses of a base-isolated structure considering hysteretic nonlinear behavior is transformed to a deterministic step-by-step integration problem. The precision of the pseudo excitation method is verified by Monte-Carlo simulation, the results for a 17-storey frame with height: width ratio=5.1 show that the isolation technique greatly reduces the inter-storey drifts and absolute accelerations of the superstructure for high-rise buildings and that the responses are substantially underestimated if the flexural effect is neglected. (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd.