Seismic mitigation performance of periodic foundations with inertial amplification mechanism considering superstructure-foundation interaction

Abstract The periodic foundation is a novel seismic isolation technology which uses the filtering characteristics of periodic structures. In order to solve the shortcomings of the existing attenuation mechanism, and to have a better attenuation effect on the main frequency band of ground motions, a periodic foundation based on the inertial amplification mechanism (IAPF) is proposed. The seismic mitigation performance of IAPF is studied by frequency response analysis. The sensitivity analysis and optimization of the interactive system which is composed of IAPF and superstructure are also carried out. The performance of the IAPF interactive system is compared with that of the interactive system composed of the local resonance periodic foundation and superstructure. The results show that IAPF does not require a large resonator mass to mitigate structural response. In addition, proper additional damping can significantly reduce the resonance peak and has negligible effect on the attenuation depth, which makes up for the shortcoming that the periodic foundation will amplify the response at the resonance peaks outside the attenuation zone to some extent.