ABSTRACT
Studies and developments of isolation systems’ theories and application technologies have been reported extensively in the literature. It is impossible and unnecessary to include all the concepts and application details in a single chapter. Therefore, only the basic but most important theories and applications are presented herein, which, as the authors intend, may guide interested readers to advanced topics in this field. The organization of this chapter is summarized as follows. In Section 2.1, basic concepts of seismically isolated structures are first introduced. Then, discussions of the mechanical properties of isolator units are presented in Section 2.2. Section 2.3 provides the important design requirements according to the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Standard ASCE 7-05 [2]. Design examples based on ASCE 7-05 are given in Section 2.4. Verifications and modifications of isolator’s mechanical properties are presented in Section 2.5.
