Effectiveness study of wire mesh vibration damper for sensitive equipment protection from seismic events

Abstract

Wire Mesh Vibration Damper (WMVD) is proposed for the protection of vibration-sensitive equipment, such as Information Technology (IT) equipment, from seismic events. The mathematical model of the proposed isolator is primarily defined and then implemented to develop the Matlab Simscape MultibodyTM model of the WMVD isolated system subjected to earthquake induced floor motion. The latter is simultaneously generated for natural earthquake records and scaled to satisfy the GR-63-CORE (Zone 4) standard requirements via an artificial seismic time-history generation procedure, developed in the present work. In order to study the isolation effectiveness of the WMVD, comparative analysis with linear anti-seismic support is firstly provided. Results reveal that the WMVD isolated system can effectively attenuate seismic response more than 85%, whereas the seismic responses of the linearly isolated system increase by 160% as compared to the ground motion acceleration. Subsequently, an Incremental Dynamic Analysis (IDA) by specifying the operational vibration limit of the sensitive equipment mounted on the WMVD, is conducted to create the fragility curves. Considering the maximum acceleration response as engineering demand parameter, seismic fragility analysis eventually demonstrates the performance of the WMVD to protect the sensitive equipment from floor motion excitation.