Issue 51

P. Naidoo et alii, Frattura ed Integrità Strutturale, 51 (2020) 52-70; DOI: 10.3221/IGF-ESIS.51.05 53 I NTRODUCTION he impact of earthquakes on structures has historically resulted in large scale damage, leading to great financial implications and human loss. This has led to multiple alterations of the seismic design philosophy of structures in earthquake prone areas. Some improvements to the design criteria include the increase of the lateral strength and ductility of structures. However, due to high construction costs, among other factors, it is not practically feasible to increase a building’s strength indefinitely. The concept of decoupling a structure from its substructure was introduced as a method of isolating it from the harmful effects of the earthquake. Base isolation systems aim to reduce the physical demand placed on a building to resist seismic actions. By incorporating base isolation into a building, this relieves the building’s structural components from the role of dissipating seismic energy and significantly reduces the structure’s relative displacements induced by the seismic waves. The most frequently used types of base isolation can be divided into two categories, thus, sliding bearings and laminated rubber bearings [1]. Sliding base isolation systems operate on the fundamental mechanism of frictional sliding, whereby a frictional force within the system resists motion induced by the seismic vibration and dissipates its energy [2]. Laminated rubber bearings consist of alternating layers of rubber and steel plates. The steel plates within the base isolators assist the system by increasing its vertical stiffness. Another type of laminated rubber bearing, which is used in this article, is the lead-core or lead-plug rubber bearing. This type of laminated bearing is comprised of alternating cylindrical or square rubber bearings and steel plates. Additionally, at the centre of the base isolator, a short cylindrical core or plug made of lead is located. This system provides a great deal of stiffness under the considerable vertical load from the superstructure and is simultaneously flexible under horizontal loading obtained from an earthquake [3]. According to the work presented in [4], the damping ability of natural rubber is limited to 2-3% of the critical viscous damping. This is relatively low and therefore negatively impacts on the bearing’s ability to dissipate seismic energy. Due to this property, the base isolation system may incorporate a lead core to provide additional damping to the system. The goal of this study is to numerically test and compare traditional base isolation systems described above and alternative systems with auxetic patterns in their structure. Auxetics, are materials with negative Poisson’s ratio. Unlike conventional materials, they experience a contraction in the transverse direction while under compression and expand while under tension. In [5] has been found that all auxetic materials possess a microstructure which is appropriate to activate negative Poisson’s ratio behaviour. This microstructure generally involves a deformation pattern such as hinging, rotating, stretching or bending. While most auxetic materials are made of porous foams or hinged metamaterials with re-entrant type microstructures, natural auxetic materials also exist [6]. The simplest auxetic structure is based on the general shape of a bow tie [7]. The ‘bow tie’ auxetic structure is more commonly known as the re-entrant hexagon structure. This structure is a modified, non-convex or inverted form of a simple hexagon structure. A conventional hexagonal or honeycomb structure presents a typical positive Poisson’s ratio behaviour when it is exposed to a lateral load. By slightly reorienting the hexagonal geometry to adopt a re-entrant structure, the modified honeycomb is seen to exhibit an auxetic behaviour. The re-entrant hexagon structure is anisotropic in nature, displaying different Poisson’s ratio values when loaded about the x and y axes respectively [5,8]. The field of auxetic materials has been developed substantially and several auxetic systems have been tested both numerically and experimentally. In addition to the re-entrant hexagon, other extensively researched auxetic structures include rotating rectangles and triangles, arrowhead and star shaped arrangements [9]. These auxetic structures have been manufactured into foams, polymers, composites and metals [10]. A study carried out in [11] analysed the static and dynamic properties of polyurethane foams with an auxetic microstructure. The conducted tests aimed to evaluate the vibration reduction properties of foams for use in gloves in order to protect workers from the harmful effects of mechanical vibrations. In comparison to non-auxetic polyurethane foam, the auxetic foam exhibited a notable increase in stiffness under compression. More studies have also indicated the significant effects of the Poisson’s ratio of auxetics, on their mechanical properties [10, 12, 13, 14, 15]. An investigation on two-dimensional re- entrant hexagon structures presented in [10], found that the vibration isolation performance of these structures depends on various geometric properties of the auxetic cells. Numerical analysis results have shown that optimisation of the cell thickness and cell angle of auxetics, results in a significant increase in the vibration level difference, when compared to preliminary models. The idea of application of locally resonant metamaterial structures for seismic isolation purposes is also elaborated in [16]. In [7] is proposed that properly designed mechanical metamaterials such as auxetics, can result in band gaps at frequencies compatible with seismic waves, enabling the usage of these materials for seismic isolation. Similar results, indicating the capability of auxetics to reduce the propagation of imposed vibration, are presented in [6, 17]. T