Experimental study on temperature dependence of mechanical properties of scaled high-performance rubber bearings

Base isolation is an efficient method to reduce the vulnerability of structures in high seismic risk zones. As the core component, the performance of the isolation bearings greatly affects the safety and reliability of the isolation system. In this paper, a series of compression shear tests were performed on three scaled rubber bearings, test temperatures range from −30 to 20 °C and different levels of shear strains were considered. Experimental results show that a negligible variation in the performance parameters is associated to the change in shear strain, and characteristics of the bearings such as the equivalent stiffness, yield force and post-yield stiffness can be significantly affected by the temperature. Then the influence coefficient functions able to take into account the influence of temperature were formulated, and the analysis values at different temperatures are in good agreement with the corresponding experimental values. The temperature influence coefficient function can be used to predict the mechanical properties of rubber bearings at different temperatures.