EXPERIMENTS AND SIMULATION ANALYSIS OF COLLISION TO RETAINING WALL WITH REAL SCALE BASE-ISOLATED BUILDING

Abstract

A base-isolated building may be damaged because of collisions with a retaining wall during a mega-earthquake. Recently, a few studies have shown the earthquake response analysis of collisions with a retaining wall using a restoring force characteristic of the retaining wall, which has not been validated experimentally. Therefore, experiments of collision to a real scale base-isolated building with a retaining wall were carried out. The acceleration data on the superstructure and restoring force characteristics of the retaining wall including the soil behind during collision with the retaining wall were obtained. Using sway springs modeling the retaining wall including the soil behind, the behavior of the superstructure during such collision can be well simulated. This finding is very important for the earthquake response analysis of a base-isolated building collided with a retaining wall.