Abstract
In big earthquakes, tumbled furniture such as bookshelves and desks in rooms may become fatal obstacles that obstruct people from evacuating. Recently, quake-proof furniture are getting popular to prevent accidents in earthquakes. It is important to understand the overturning behaviors of furniture with and without quake-proof countermeasures under seismic excitations, as well as the behaviors and damages of the building itself. In this paper, the motion behaviors of furniture were analyzed using the Adaptively Shifted Integration (ASI) -Gauss code utilizing frictional contact algorithm based on the sophisticated penalty method. The numerical results were validated by comparing with the experimental results. The numerical code was also applied to a motion analysis of a furniture placed at each floor of an RC building.
