Abstract
It was reported that a number of valuable objects such as antiques had fell down and been damaged when the Mid Niigata Prefecture Earthquake in 2004 had occurred. This paper proposes a three dimensional seismic isolator which can keep the isolator stage horizontal while the stage can move in the vertical direction. The isolator has been developed in the aim of protecting relatively small but valuable items such as works of art in museums against earthquakes. Two linkages have been employed for the mechanism to prevent the isolator stage from tilting, and the validation of the proposed mechanism is performed in both simulations and experiments. It proves that the proposed seismic isolator can reduce the magnitude of acceleration approximately to one fifth of that of the input in both horizontal and vertical direction, which can also reduce the possibility of overturning of objects.
