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

• Published in: Mechanical systems and signal processing Vol. 164; p. 108160
• Main Authors: Mezghani, Fares, Fernandez del Rincón, Alfonso, Garcia Fernandez, Pablo, de-Juan, Ana, Sanchez-Espiga, Javier, Viadero Rueda, Fernando
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Ltd 01-02-2022
• Subjects: Artificial seismic time-history generation procedure; Comparative analysis; Fragility analysis; Matlab Simscape MultibodyTM model; Vibration-sensitive equipment protection; Wire mesh vibration damper; Matlab Simscape MultibodyTM model; Artificial seismic time-history generation procedure; Wire mesh vibration damper; Comparative analysis; Fragility analysis; Vibration-sensitive equipment protection
• ISSN: 0888-3270; 1096-1216
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ymssp.2021.108160

•Wire mesh vibration damper (WMVD) is presented as seismic mitigation solution to protect sensitive equipment from earthquake induced floor motion.•Multi-body model of the WMVD isolated system is developed using Matlab Simscape MultibodyTM.•An artificial seismic time-history generation procedure is employed to simulate the synthetic earthquakes.•The effectiveness of the studied isolator is demonstrated based on the comparisons of dynamic seismic responses between WMVD and linearly isolated systems.•Reliability of the WMVD to protect vibration-sensitive equipment is investigated based on seismic fragility analysis.
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.