Design and development of a seismic shaking table for evaluation and analysis of the performance of elastomeric bearing

Earthquake occurrences cause a wide range of destruction and damages to human properties ranging from expensive equipment to infrastructure and buildings. Elastomeric bearings are one of the solutions proposed to minimise the impact of earthquake by dissipating the earthquake ground motions to surrounding through flexible horizontal stiffness. The aim of this project is to design and develop a seismic shaking table for analysing and evaluating the performance of elastomeric bearings. The methodology employed is to generate analog voltage signals in the same ratio of the original earthquake displacement data through Arduino microcontroller for the pneumatic cylinder to drive the shake table according to a real recorded earthquake displacement data. The accuracy of reproduced seismic signals achieved by the proposed system is 83.98% for Kobe 1995, 85.11% for El-Centro 1940 and 84.07% for Kocaeli 1999. For the simulation of seismic response of test specimen, the reduction of PGD and PGA is 25.39% and 91.47% for Kobe 1995, 23.76% and 84.30% for El-Centro 1940, and 13.10% and 40.34% for Kocaeli 1999.