Abstract
Improperly secured furniture, especially on the upper floors of high-rise buildings under long-period ground motion, can become dangerous objects for human life. Many tumbled furniture such as chairs and tables in schools could become fatal obstacles that prevent children from evacuating. The objective of this research is to develop an effective numerical code to analyze the motion behaviors of furniture subjected to seismic excitations. The numerical code is constituted based upon the adaptively shifted integration (ASI) – Gauss technique, which is a finite element scheme that provides higher computational efficiency than the conventional code. This code is able to analyze dynamic behavior with strong nonlinearities which are related to phenomena such as fracture and contact. In this paper, the frictional contact between objects was fully con-sidered by employing a sophisticated penalty method. A basic evaluation was carried out by comparing the results of certain experiments with analyses of the motion behaviors of steel cabinets excited by sine waves. It should be emphasized that the present code is able to evaluate the motion behaviors of the furniture as well as the deformations and stress distributions, which is one of the advantages of using a finite element scheme.