Base Isolation Versus Dual Design Philosophy for Seismic Design of Buildings: Preliminary Case Study

The structures are generally designed through dual design philosophy or more broadly known as performance-based design. In this philosophy, the strength is limited to minimize the cost relying on damage-absorbing capacity or ductility capacity of structural members. Still lack of understanding of many issues of nonlinear behavior of structural member makes this method an interesting topic for further research. Base isolation technique is not possible to adopt many a times due to financial limitation. However, this technique may be made more economic and practically implementable through further research. Further, design methodology can also be simplified. Thus, possibly such methodology can be used for an identified class of buildings through further research in this direction. Example case studies presented in the paper for both structures on base isolator and those designed by dual design philosophy clearly indicate intuitively understandable findings. Finally, the paper provides a qualitative insight for economically viable use of base isolation system. It also shows the possibilities of how inelastic excursion-based dual design philosophy can be simultaneously used along with base isolation for reducing the cost further. © 2018, The Institution of Engineers (India).