Recent Progress in Taiwan on Seismic Isolation , Energy Dissipation , and Active Vibration Control

In Taiwan, seismic isolation and energy dissipation technology has been extensively applied in new and retrofitted buildings and infrastructures against seismic attacks after the 1999 Chi-Chi Earthquake. In the beginning, most applications involved critical structures such as medical and emergency response facilities that are required to remain fully functional during and after earthquakes. Since 2009, the use of such technology has been greatly expanded to residential buildings for better seismic protection and life quality. To date, the numbers of building projects adopting seismic isolators and velocity-dependent dampers are more than 120 and 400, respectively. Recently, isolating equipment and facilities from damage due to earthquakes also attracts growing attention and has been implemented in practice. In this paper, several representative applications of passive control technology to buildings and critical facilities or equipment in Taiwan are illustrated first. The practical performance of some seismically isolated buildings and equipment during the 2016 Meinong Earthquake is also reviewed. Then, several new and advanced testing facilities of the National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering (NCREE) are briefly introduced. By applying the existing and new testing facilities at NCREE, some current and future research topics relevant to passive control technology in Taiwan are discussed. 1 REPRESENTATIVE APPLICATIONS OF PASSIVE CONTROL TECHNOLOGY IN TAIWAN 1.1 Seismic isolation More than half of seismically isolated buildings in Taiwan adopt the mid-story isolation design. As implied in the name, the isolation system is incorporated into the mid-story (mostly installed on the top of the first story) rather than the base of the building, as illustrated in Figure 1. The mid-story isolation design, of course, has lots of advantages over the base isolation design in terms of construction efficiency, space use, maintenance, and etc. Nevertheless, its dynamic behavior might become more complex and its analysis should be paid more attention compared to the base isolation design, especially when the isolation system is installed at a higher story or the substructure is more flexible (Wang et al. 2012; Wang et al. 2013). In Taiwan, currently, the highest mid-story isolation system is installed above the fourth story of a residential building (B6F~16F), as presented in Figure 2. For base-isolated buildings, currently, the tallest one is a precast reinforced concrete (RC) residential building with a total height of 133.2m (B3F~38F) and an aspect ratio of 3.17 in New Taipei City (Liou 2010), as shown in Figure 3. The isolation system is installed underneath 1F and consists of 43 lead rubber (LR) bearings in which the maximum cross-section diameter is 1.5m. The separation between the superstructure and surrounding retaining wall is 50cm. The elastic period before isolation and the effective period after isolation under design basis earthquake (DBE) shaking are 3.29sec and 5.18sec, respectively.