EACS 2016 Paper No. 179
The design of structures has primarily been geared towards addressing the most dominating hazard at the location of interest. Evidence of global warming and the associated extreme climate conditions, however, have increased the probability of a structure being subjected to different types of extreme demands. As a result, the design philosophy of structures is shifting towards a more holistic approach of addressing multiple hazards to ensure adequate performance under different loading scenarios. This requires the utilization of new structural systems that can sustain only minimal damage under extreme loads. In this paper, two new floor isolation techniques are presented and their main features are discussed. The floor isolation systems are employed in numerical analysis to re-evaluate the response of building systems utilizing these isolation slabs under uncoupled multiple hazards of wind and seismic demands. It is shown that the proposed systems out-perform the response of conventional composite slab buildings.