Abstract
Non-structural components such as furniture, ceilings and lightings show
different behaviours during earthquakes depending on input seismic waves,
floor heights, friction coefficients of floors, locations of other objects
in the vicinity, and so on. These conditions may vary in each situation
and it is very difficult for people to understand and apply appropriate
anti-seismic means to those components around them. In this study, an effective
finite element code to simulate the behaviours of in-door non-structural
components under seismic excitations was constructed to use as a risk evaluation
tool in the near future. Numerical models of furniture and ceilings with
lightings were constructed using linear Timoshenko beam elements and the
analyses were conducted using the adaptively shifted integration (ASI)
– Gauss code [1]. A sophisticated penalty method [2] was applied to realize
the slip and contact motions of furniture with and without casters.Some
validations by experimental results are shown and the behaviours of non-structural
components in a room are visualized by a VR system constructed using the
Unity software.