Modelling Geotechnical Seismic Isolation Systems through the Preisach Formalism

Soil-structure interaction of structures protected by Geotechnical Seismic Isolation (GSI) system is investigated in this paper through a novel nonlinear approach.Preisach formalism is adopted to model the hysteretic behaviour of the soil through simplified nonlinear springs and dashpots.The efficiency of GSI versus natural soil is explored through extensive nonlinear numerical analyses on a benchmark structure.Comparisons with the currently adopted equivalent linear approach are also presented, highlighting the versatility of the proposed nonlinear model to reliably represent the nonlinear behaviour of the coupled structure-GSI system.