Limitations of height-to-width ratio for base-isolated buildings under earthquake

The limitation of height-to-width ratio (HWR) for a base-isolated building with elastomeric rubber bearings is of considerable concern to structural design engineers. Guidelines and codes on this type of building have to deal with this issue. Nevertheless, until now, no systematical and quantitative studies have been done on this problem for base-isolated buildings. For this reason, the main objective of this paper is to focus on investigations on the limit of the HWR for the isolated building with rubber bearings under different conditions subjected to earthquake excitations. The simplified formulation is derived to explore the rules of seismic responses for the structural system and some influential factors, such as the site soil conditions, seismic ground motion intensity, period of the isolated system, period of the superstructure and layout of isolators, are studied and discussed. According to the numerical results, it has been found that the effects of site soil conditions on the HWR limit values are important: the softer the site is, the smaller the HWR limit value is under different seismic intensities. The predominant period of an isolated building also plays a considerable role in the HWR limit value, namely, the isolated building with a longer period may have a relatively large HWR value; and the stiffness of the superstructure affects the HWR limit value little. Furthermore, an effective method to improve the HWR limit value is proposed. Copyright (C) 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.