VIRTUAL LABORATORY FOR STUDYING OF PERFORMANCE REQUIREMENTS AND TESTING OF ELASTOMERIC ISOLATORS

In the last decades in civil engineering structures the seismic isolation method is wide implemented using elastomeric isolators. The up-to-date requirements for elastomeric isolators, methods of their testing and monitoring during the design, production and certification are regulated and assigned in the standard EN15429 “Antiseismic devices“, accepted in 2011. The standard represents the most complete and up-to-date document presently available to seismic design engineers and seismic hardware manufactories. It covers all types of seismic devices in existence and leaves a door open to future progress [1].
For realization of ideas and methods given in the standard, providing the reached level of development of isolation systems and their improvement, an actual task is it’s studying by civil engineering students as well as a wide audience of industry specialists in the design, construction, control inspection, installation and operation.
In this paper a method of active learning of performance requirements for elastomeric isolators through a virtual reproduction of the specified in the standard tests during their production and certification of compliance. For this purpose, the virtual laboratory that includes Simulink models of elastomeric isolators and Simulink models of loading devices is developed. Simulink models of isolators reproduce the main effects of their functioning, such as non-linear elasticity, scragging, damping, creep and elastic-plastic behaviour. The Simulink models of loading devices reproduce a constant, ramp, triangular and sinusoidal loadings. For demonstration of elastomeric devices effectiveness, Simulink models of buildings and bridges as well as earthquakes load records are included in the library. Visualization of demanded functional parameters during simulation is carried out by using the corresponding blocks of Simulink package.
Studying the standard by the proposed method provides a parallel study of its contents and working with Simulink models in form of laboratory work.

References:
[1] Medeot R., “The European standard on Anti-seismic devices”, The 14th World Conference on Earthquake Engineering, October 12-17, 2008, Beijing, China