Preliminary Study on the Optimal Calibration of High Damping Rubber Bearings

Seismic isolation emerged as an efficient technology for seismic protection. It has been proven to simultaneously reduce inter-story drift demands and horizontal accelerations in buildings when properly implemented. Since the 80s, several numerical models appeared in literature to simulate the dissipative behaviour of High Damping Rubber Bearings (HDRB) devices under different acting scenarios. Despite the efforts provided by several authors to reproduce the real behaviour of such devices through the definition of efficient numerical models, the variability of laws’ parameters in the mass-production series of devices should receive further investigations. This research presents the preliminary results pointed out by an identification procedure of no.2 existing literature models with an increasing level of computation effort. The reliability of the numerical outputs and the goodness of each numerical model have been demonstrated by comparing them with experimental tests obtained from the SISMALAB laboratory. Experimental data are composed of no. 5 samples of the same devices, subjected to both compression forces and horizontal displacement under sinusoidal cyclic deformation. The optimal values of each device have been obtained by performing an optimization process where the difference between experimental and numerical behaviour has been minimized. The well-known Genetic Algorithm has been chosen for this purpose.